As I understand it, the problems will most likely surface when doing upgrades.
If you always change the ProductCode every build, AND you schedule the
RemoveExistingProducts action at the earliest permissible point (see the specs
for that action to know the permissible locations to schedule it) you may
survive, but there are several people on this list who would know much better
than I do.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Bennett
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 6:44 PM
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [WiX-users] Automating maintenance of component lists
Hi all,
I'm trying to automatically maintain wix source files to generate a .msi as
the final stage of a build process. That is, each time a build is done, I'd
like to update a wix source file to refer to the latest set of files that are
designated as being in the release. It's quite important to us that this be
automated, as we're trying to reduce the number of file lists that need to be
hand-maintained down to a very small number...
I'm sill new to WiX, but so far I can see three pretty different ways to do
this:
1) "Manually" generating the <directory> tree structure by writing code to
traverse directories and generate code, guids and component ids.
2) Using tallow from WiX 2.0 to generate a fragment, then link it in. (Not sure
about the linking process yet, but it looks easy enough)
3) Using heat from WiX 3.0 to do basically the same thing as 2).
However, I'm seeing warnings everywhere that generating Guids automatically
(with the -gg options on both tallow and heat) is a Bad Thing (tm). For
example, Tallow gives this warning (annoyingly mixed into stdout): WARNING:
AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING GUIDS IS A DANGEROUS FEATURE BECAUSE IT MAY CA
USE COMPONENT RULES TO BE BROKEN. PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES TO LEARN M
ORE ABOUT THE COMPONENT RULES. <snip>
Also, Derek Cicerone's blog on Heat explicitly says you're not supposed to
attempt to automatically maintain setup files: "Heat is designed to allow a
setup author to very quickly generate their setup authoring the first time.
From then onward, the authoring should be maintained manually to ensure that
guids and identifiers remain stable and component rules are not broken."
Does anyone have any thoughts, comments or suggestions on what the best way to
handle this is? Since we probably don't really intend to track Guids anyway, or
attempt to perform upgrades at this fine-grained component level (the whole
product is under 10 meg), is it safe to disregard these warnings? How do other
people automatically maintain WiX setup files, presuming that it is indeed safe
and desirable to do so.
Thanks for any ideas,
Steve
Steve Bennett
[POWERflex Corporation ]
[Tel: +61-3-9548-9006 Fax: +61-3-9548-9003]
[Email: spb @ pfxcorp.com Web: www.pfxcorp.com]
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