Folks, can you please comment on the issue of some installers using RAR and having password in them? It's described here.

It makes unpacking them with innoextract impossible (or with unrar for that matter). Is there any reason to use those passwords? Is it a new behavior of innosetup, and can you switch it off somehow if it's so?

OK, I'll ask someone with such game to contact support. Though I doubt it's their call, it's a question for the packaging team and I suspect support won't route the request to them because it's not about "game not working on supported platform". May be you can help with directing the message to the right people at least?

Using such password in installer is close to being some DRM "dust" and shouldn't be really in GOG's spirit.

I own some of the games using this new packaging method, and am ready to run some tests.
As shmerl said, I’m worried general support won’t be able to comment on this (this problem occurs only when using Windows installers on non-Windows OS, so a bit out of scope of the official support). If I’m wrong, just tell me and I’ll send them a ticket.
Otherwise, please PM me a contact e-mail to the packaging team (if it doesn’t go against GOG rules) and I’ll take some time to try to work out a solution with them.

innounp.exe is a Windows app and innoextract has a Windows version. I think you can cause the problem to happen "using a Windows installer on Windows" if you need to split hairs.

Thanks (with some delay) for the answers to my previous questions.

I'd also like a word from GOG about the installer issue. I'd rather not waste my money buying games that (would otherwise work in Wine but) cannot be extracted in Linux.

I think the problem here goes farther than just the possibility to extract the game data under Linux.

Until now, thanks to open-source tools like innoextract or innounp, we were assured to be able to get the games data from the installers whatever happened to binary compatibility with future Windows versions.

With password-encrypted archives, should the compatibility with InnoSetup binary format be dropped anytime in the future, our games would be uninstallable. That is *not* something the GOG.com team I thought to know would do.
No need to say I’m truly worried about this new packaging choice, which goes against the whole no-DRM point of this place. If the perennity of the games I buy here is no longer assured, what makes GOG any better than Steam or Origin?

From my observation it looks like they're trying to package the games in smaller sizes, which is a good intention towards who doesn't have a fast connection speed / limited bandwidth but unknowingly they're hampering Linux users.

I don't understand why there's a password in those archives, I own a few of the affected games and while I'm not going to play them yet, I don't want the bad surprise of not being able to at least extract them in Linux when their time comes.

Ultimately I don't understand why complicate things this much, I have extracted countless of Inno packaged software in WINE and GOG's are the only ones that give me trouble and errors.

well, you could still just run the installer using wine, or not? Running the installer also has the advantage that it will create any registry entries that the game may need. You won't get those if you extract the content manually.

I haven't seen this myself but: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_support_on_gog/post1639

That's what I find troublesome as well. When people were discussing the inability to extract the installers using innoextract I thought it wasn't that big of a deal, because if you are going to need Wine anyway you might as well use it to actually install the game. But if the new installers are indeed not working with Wine... it would basically impossible to run any of the games, even if they are 100% compatible with Wine. No way to extract them, no way to install them.

ah, didn't know about that.
So it sounds as if these new installers use some new feature that isn't implemented yet in wine.
Did anybody who has encountered these errors filed a bugreport at winehq.org? Would be interesting to know how difficult it is to make this work under wine.

Yes, running the installer through WINE still works for me. But like you’ve seen from other posts, it’s not working for everyone. WINE can not be taken as a reliable mean to access the installers contents, as its efficiency can vary greatly from one setup to another.

innoextract on the other side is reliable (innounp might be too, I didn’t study it fully yet)… Or at least it was until now. These new installers incompatible with innoextract aren’t perennial like the previous were: I’m depending either on future Windows version to not break the compatibility (I wouldn’t bet on this, seeing that it’s precisely Windows poor retro-compatibility that bring us GOG in the first place), or on WINE, which as you can see from other posts is no more reliable.

That lets me depending on GOG updating the installers to take care of the compatibility with future Windows version. If GOG shut down, I’m let with installers doomed to be unusable at some point in the future. A situation no better than the Valve one.

We’re not facing a "Linux-only" kind of problem here.

InnoUnp Does extract the inno .iss file used to build the installer with, and the registry information for each game is included within, not exactly user friendly but if you know how to fiddle with regedit it's doable manually.