I must say, you have all made my day. I've spent months banging my head
and feeling like I'm not worth a damn despite all my non-deployment
development experience. And worse, feeling like no one would understand
why this installer is sucking up so many staff hours even if I tried my
technical best to explain it! Now I feel validated.
John McFayden does raise a good point in bringing up the perspective of
the MSI user over that of the developers. I try to believe that even
ridiculous-seeming things we encounter might actually have a very good
reason behind them if we only knew the actual requirement that they were
intended to fulfill. Yes, I know, 8.3 file names and such do not provide
a compelling example of this in 2008. But it's still more likely that
there is (or once was) a good reason for it than that there are a bunch
of dunces writing the software we depend upon. Each trade-off made was
probably well reasoned, and yet we still have MSI as we know it today.
Who is to say that we would not have made the same decision at the time?
As for writing the installer first (SDD), I think it is a good idea but
impractical to most people's minds who aren't trained to think that way.
(It's hard enough to get them to do TDD!) But I agree with Neil's (and
Rob's) "together we can make it happen" thinking. Good practice suggests
having a reasonable base infrustructure for development, CM, etc early
on. So it should be with the MSI. After all the work my group has done
to get my current project "humming" (albeit somewhat out of tune at
times), I'd be very disappointed if my client did not end up distilling
this work (especially this mysterious MSI thing) into a repeatable
process for future use. Capitalize on the experience!
Ultimately, there are usability concerns all over everything we've been
discussing: The usability of MSI severely impacts the usability of WiX.
Perhaps WiX can improve the usability of of MSI. Maybe a future version,
or a layer on top of WiX will achieve that. Similarly, the process of
developing software has usability issues. If you make it easy to
consider the installer at the outset by making a canned build project
that has a ready-to-go target for MSI-generation, it'll be that much
easier. Much like refactoring support and easy-to-use continuous
integration have been a significant enabler for agile development. But
it takes time, research, and conversations like this to determine what
that canned build project should provide. Votive and the MSBuild parts
for WiX go a long way toward helping with this.
I thank you all for the discussion, validation, and the continuing
support!
Raj
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob
Mensching
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 1:00 PM
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] yep - back to being 100% frustrated
I think we've covered the whole gambit of issues on this thread. I am
going through all of them and will try to collect all the issues raised
here and attempt to answer some the open questions over time.
However, this particular comment made me chuckle:
"They solved the 8.3 filename issue in WiX V3.. I
believe they can do more."
Heh. "They" is *us*. You and you and you and you over there who
doesn't talk much. This mailing list, this place where we talk about
what we do with the WiX toolset and the Windows Installer, this is where
we live. This is where we get work done. This is where we make the
world a better place one line of code or one question answered or one
piece of feedback at a time. You may think that's all flowery language
or complete and utter bullshit but that is how I see what we (all of us)
are doing here. We are a community built around using the WiX toolset
and making it better.
The WiX toolset isn't done. Nobody here is arguing that there isn't
more that we can do to make the experience better. Just look at our bug
list and you can see literally hundreds of places where we are *clearly*
not done. IMHO, there is so much work to do the real question is about
what gets done next.
All I ask is that you remember that there are people here. We work on
code, we talk about code, but this place is about people. I understand
that the technology (both MSI and WiX) can be frustrating. Trust me, we
all know that. I also appreciate that sometimes you just have to rant
to get it out of your system. It's fine if you want to do that here (I
always read rants about actual problems since they almost always point
at some pain point we have yet to address). But don't make it personal.
I can assure you that no one here is actively working to make your life
harder. Instead, I encourage you to consider yourself a member of this
community and frame your feedback such that it can help us improve the
toolset or the community itself.
Finally, I disagree with the sentiment that this thread was doomed from
the beginning. Open (and preferably respectful) debate is one of the
best ways to explore the spectrum of options and issues available for us
to solve. You underestimate the power you have in this community if you
think that debates like this (that were mostly respectful <smile/>) have
no impact.
PS: None of my comments are intended to be directed *at* Scott. They
are about *all of us*. <smile/>
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott
Palmer
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 07:22
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] yep - back to being 100% frustrated
We all knew this thread was going nowhere from the first post of
course...
My only point was that (in my experience) the original posters
frustration is shared by the vast majority of developers trying to do
installers on Windows. (i.e. everyone I know that has ever seen or
worked on a WiX project)
Anything that can be done by WiX to ease these pain points is therefore
justified by the vast payoff in improved productivity around the globe
:-)
They solved the 8.3 filename issue in WiX V3.. I believe they can do
more.
Regards,
Scott
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