Up until just 2 weeks ago the Managed Code debate was certainly applicable. Also I believe that your desire to be 100% perfect on authoring content ( a good goal ) is conflicting with users goals to decrease the learning curve and accelerate authoring with visual designers. But you usually don't frame it in that context, you usually just say something along the lines of a `I'm a command line guy` or `notepad is fine`. Users clearly don't think that as I often get comments talking about how hard WiX is. In the end, I don't know if refusing to automate authoring really helps any as people can still get unexpected results. Take the recent MergeMod.dll problem in WiX. That was a pain point as a result of OMUS and MSI's narrow view of what you should and should not do. InstallShield has a checkbox called always overwrite that helps on a per component basis but you still have to know to check it. I was at InstallShield a year and a half ago and one of the things that I suggested was to extend validation across builds. Write now validation can catch some problems with a package but it can't catch the type of problem that MergeMod caused. But if you could identify the database elements that influence all of these unexpected behaviors, catalog them and then holistically validate the package against previous packages you could problem solve many of them. Then you could probably consider more automated authoring. Rob Mensching <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: That article focuses on the case where the leaders of the project become detached from the users of the project. It really doesn't matter if the project is open source or commercial, the results are the same. Users quit using the project. For commercial entities that usually ends up affecting the bottom line (the article refers to this as "get developers fired"). For open source projects the project ends up with fewer users or ends up forking and going in different directions.
To bring the point back home, I can't currently think of any cases where this is a problem for the WiX toolset. There are plenty of things that need to be fixed/addressed in the WiX toolset but I don't think the leaders of the project or the users of the project disagree here. The two cases I can think of where there has been some contention: 1. FragmentRef. Fragment ref was a WiX v2 concept that over time I found wasn't really necessary. What I found was everyone was putting FragementRefs everywhere. In WiX v3 we removed the FragmentRef concept and some people complained. The complaints were exactly what I was looking for because it helped us find the remaining places where references were not being automatically generated by the WiX toolset. Now that those are fixed, functionality that was not necessary was removed for a better system... I think. 2. Component Rules. These things have been the bane of my existence since the end of my internship on the Windows Installer team back in 1998. I documented the rules and sent them around to all of the developers back then. I was incredulous that they could be real but as well all know now they are. The Component Rules make auto-generating content in the core toolset very, very difficult because so much management infrastructure has to be in place to make sure the Component GUIDs remain stable. Otherwise, a product will end up unpatchable or worse. IMHO it is not acceptable for the WiX toolset to autogenerate content that makes one's packages to be unpatchable. I know there are some tools out there that solve some of the problems with Component GUID generation but they aren't perfect. Still working on the "perfect solution" here since being partially wrong has very negative consequences. In any case, I think the "leaders of the project" and the "users of the project" are still mostly aligned... since we all just want a working solution. I'm curious if there are any topics that people feel there is a disconnect between the "users of the project" and the "leaders of the project"? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Friedrich Dominicus Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 23:19 To: Christopher Painter Cc: Bob Arnson; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date Christopher Painter writes: > Hmmm... > > > > >http://www.productbeautiful.com/2008/05/02/why-product-management-is-open-sources-fatal-flaw/ Nice read, I can sympathize with both sides. Howerver the users are not willing to pay and so why should I care as developer. I do as I like, the latter is the "right" answer. And haveing a product manager should help? I doubt it very much, how comes that Office 2007 was auch a plight, I bet MS surely have some very clever Product managers, how comes that Vista reputation is that bad, hardly the result of clever product management ... Regards Friedrich ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. 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 2008. 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 Christopher Painter, Author of Deployment Engineering Blog Have a hot tip, know a secret or read a really good thread that deserves attention? E-Mail Me ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. 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
