Hello Peter, Actually the MSM is not intened to be delivered to unknown users. It installs a component which is shared between company's products (it's a part which ensures communication between all our company's products) So, must probably we shall know the products to which we ship the patches. All products must install it because some customers may buy two of the products, others may buy other two product and so on. Unfortunatelly, as I said before, not all these product which share the common component use WIX to create their installers, so although I would like it, I cannot use the WIX libraries. My question regarding patching the msm is: if I create a patch for adressed to only one of the products which patches a MSM component and the patch is applied to a machine were two products containing the MSM's components are installed then will the patch update the common component or not ?
Regarding the WIX patch building system I have tested for a while and I was delighted with it (great work) - seemed to me much easier to use than the patchwiz way and also the ability to filter what you need in the patch is also great . Unfortunatelly I will not be able to use it as I need to take advantage of patch optimization which is not yet supported with the WIX system and from what I understand in your blog will not be available very soon. I must deliver large Service Packs which I need to be as small as possible so I need really bad the optimization. Many thanks, Cristian. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Marcu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Cristian Baiu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 6:50 PM Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Some STUPID Limitations in WiX If you need to get an msm from someone because they don't use WiX, that makes sense. If you're msi is the only one consuming those msm's you wont hit the major problem of servicing msm's which is, you don't know all of the various places it was consumed and therefore you don't know all the products to ship patches for. If you are using WiX v3 and want to take advantage of the Patch building system, changes to msm's wont show up in your patches. I can give workarounds for that scenario if you have it so let me know. If you use patchwiz to generate you patches everything should work. The major benefit of the Patch system in WiX is the ability to filter only the changes you want into a patch. PatchWiz doesn't allow you to do this. The only other major limitation is the one Dong pointed out which is that things in an MSM are not referencable from you WiX authoring. If you've broken things apart such that you don't need to reference stuff in the MSM then you should be ok here. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Cristian Baiu Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:20 PM To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Some STUPID Limitations in WiX Hello Peter, Hello everybody, Peter, you said: "For #2. Use libraries instead of modules. My advice is to produce modules only if you are shipping them for consumption in a setup you have no control over. They have additional limitations when you get into patching that make them hard to service. WiX supports msm's because Windows installer supports them but I would only recommend using them as a last resort :) Dont use them to share setup logic within your own system. Take advantage of the linker to separate things into smaller projects and pull it all together in the end." Can you explain a little more what are the problems involving patches and MSMs ? I am extremely worried because in our company we have more products which share a big module. We decided to implement the installation the shared part as an MSM created with WIX (which installs files, writes registries, registers COM and permorms some extremly necessary custom actions). These decision was made because the setups for our products are done by different teams (not all of these teams using WIX), so we didn't want to share this installation as library but rather MSM (we decided one team creates the MSM and maintains it and other teams just use it). As I am part of the team which handles the MSM, I'm very woried to hear that I will probably have problems to patch it, so I would like to know what my problems could be in order to know how to avoid these problems. Many thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
