The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package

When creating a deployment script I ran into the following error during the installation of the package:

“The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package”
This was after I added about 200 images to the solution.

After a while I found out that the problem occurred only after the solution package reached the size of 1440 KB. It turns out that this is a backwards compatibility ‘feature’ for the good old floppy’s.

After adding a couple of settings in my .ddf file everything works exactly the way it should be.

Apply the following settings to your .ddf file

.Set CabinetFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderSizeThreshold=0
.Set MaxCabinetSize=0
.Set MaxDiskFileCount=0
.Set MaxDiskSize=0

Create the .wsp again using makecab and there you go!

Thanks to

Mark Beij http://blog.martmuller.nl/DisableSizeLimitsForWspCabFiles.aspx