Richard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> A semi easier solution is to write something that calls "heat dir" each
time
>> to generate a .wxs you include in your build. Should take about a day of
>> dev/testing.
>Ah, much better, thank you.
Funny, InstallShield has had this functionality for years... it's called
dynamic file linking. And I'm sure if I was to call it by this name many
people in this list would jump to say `Don't Use It`. And yet it's the same
thing as calling heat at build time.
I don't use dynamic file linking because it causes some very serious
problems. Some obvious and some not so obvious. I cover many of them ( and
how things could be made better by tools vendors ) at:
http://blog.deploymentengineering.com/2007/06/dealing-with-very-large-number-of-files.html
The first problem is enforcing component rules. It gets very difficult to
decide which files should be key files, making sure that their ComponentID's
are consistent. A second problem is performance... it's a really slow build
process that has to dynamically author an install and check previous packages
to sync ComponentID's ( InstallShield does this ).
My real problem is that I don't try to guess developer intent. That is what
happens when new files show up and files disappear. Just because some file
shows up doesn't mean it should be deployed.... maybe someone had a compiler
setting wrong ( like a CopyLocal=True when it shouldn't have been ) or they
did something stupid like check a file in that they shouldn't have. And
what happens when a file disappears... it's very difficult to author a
punctured component story and have that keyfile go away during a minor upgrade.
Then of course there is the basic failure mode problem.... if a file goes
missing that should not have, well we are dynamic so it won't throw a build
error.
I'm sorry but this is a story that needs to be looked at much deeper then say
zip it up and use a CA or use dynamic file linking/heat to autogenerate. MSI
doesn't make setup easy in this area.
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