Enabled the creation of EXEs via Inno Setup

[jmjaffe37]

Hello!
Microsoft recently made the decision to start transitioning our Windows installers from MSI to EXE. This decision was made to accommodate a more modern user experience that is user-friendly, fully accessible, and easily customized. The tool Inno Setup is used to create these EXEs.

Microsoft has already published these EXEs for the October-2025 release. You can find them on our downloads page. For your convenience, I will also provide a direct download link to our latest, live OpenJDK 25 EXE here (Note: this link is for an x64 installation).

[steelhead31]

Does this require additional software to be installed on the build machines ?

[karianna]

Commented out why?

[jmjaffe37]

I left an explanation in comments under the [CustomMessages] section marker. Here, commented messages were done via AI and need to be verified by someone who speaks the language. They represent languages that we are supposed to support, but we do not yet have translated yet (all non-commented messages pulled from the msi translations). @karianna

[jmjaffe37]

Does this require additional software to be installed on the build machines?

@steelhead31, yes it does but it can be done in a script similar to what is done for wix. That said it would be safer to have this already present on the build machine since our alternative is to curl the inno setup exe and then install it via cli

[steelhead31]

Does this require additional software to be installed on the build machines?

@steelhead31, yes it does but it can be done in a script similar to what is done for wix. That said it would be safer to have this already present on the build machine since our alternative is to curl the inno setup exe and then install it via cli

Thanks @jmjaffe37 I'll take a look at the work needed to make the changes to the infrastructure and things like the windows docker build images etc. It'll probably be early in the new year, due to the upcoming holiday season.

[steelhead31]

@jmjaffe37 following discussions with the PMC, we'll open this to the community for discussion, and investigate the infra changes ( and potentially build/release pipeline changes ) that need to be made. The plan would be to target the jdk26 release in March, and potentially publish both MSI & EXE installers alongside some blog posts, and other relevant documentation updates ( as required )

[steelhead31]

@jmjaffe37 , Im going to take a look at the scope of work required to implement this #1311

Once done, it can be approved, planned implemented etc.