You need to change the wixproj (or make a new one) when you add a new en-AU package, or the new en-AU package will never be created. Right?
Now, regarding locales that the installer has to "support", what specifically are you referring to? If I build an installation package for the zh-TW culture, that MSI file works in computers built and configured for Hong Kong without any issues at all (assuming that those in Hong Kong can read Traditional Chinese written by people in Taiwan). If I need a slightly different package for Hong Kong, then I have to make a different one for that locale, which of course requires authoring. Depending on the OS, most languages "neutral" locales work with Windows Installer packages (such as using "9" instead of 1033 for English). The only exceptions I could find were one or two of the newer languages where neutral languages were never defined and Chinese where for some reason "1" is regarded as Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese (I assume it is due to some legacy something-or-other in native Win32. .Net has it right AFAIK). We successfully used Taiwan and China as the countries to get the correct language settings without any issue to cover the "Chinese neutral" languages. Or is there some other culture support from Installer you are referring to? Is it the transforms that are named after the LCID? That has never been supported by the Windows Installer team (although several groups both within and outside of MSFT have used it on occasion). It is best practice to ship separate installation packages for each "locale" you support, whether those be language neutral or market-based. If your requirements are to build installers for Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, Spanish, French, German, and Russian, you can supply wxl files with every single string used for the following cultures and you will get seven MSIs, each of which will have the languages you authored: "zh-cn;zh-tw;en;es;fr;de;ru". OTOH, MSFT ships "en-US" to every English speaking nation on this earth and virtually no one gets any errors or complains as a result. The "culture" setting in WiX (and the corresponding "ProductLanguage" property) aren't used for very many formatting decisions. Any of those decisions that do exist would require you build a package for that specific culture anyway, and of course that requires "authoring" for that culture. -----Original Message----- From: Lian Jiang [mailto:lji...@microsoft.com] Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 11:53 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] LCID and language/culture fallback Blair, It is interesting to know the fallback mechanism. However, this does not address the problem that all supported cultures need to be known in authoring time. If the business requirement says "the installer should support Chinese traditional language", it is not enough information to author the installer because the installer need to know "what cultures using Chinese traditional language should be supported?". But the same business requirement may be enough to author a .NET UI application because this app only cares about string localization for languages and .NET automatically handles cultures. You gave example "en-US,en;en-CA,en". If later on we decide to support en-AU, we need to change the wixproj. Is there a way to specify a culture and then all family cultures fall back to this culture? For example, my wixproj uses en-US, and en-?? Falls back to en-us; my wixproj uses zh-TW, then zh-HK falls back to zh-TW; my wixproj uses fr-fr; then fr-?? Falls back to fr-fr... This way my wixproj does not need to changed for new cultures which are in the same family of a supported culture. Appreciate your guidance. Thanks Lian -----Original Message----- From: Blair [mailto:os...@live.com] Sent: 2009年10月11日 21:28 To: 'General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.' Subject: Re: [WiX-users] LCID and language/culture fallback I've built several cultures using one wixproj. If you are using votive, the setting is in the wixproj properties window in the "Build" tab. Otherwise simply make a semi-colon delimited list of cultures (e.g. "zh-TW; en-US") as a property called "Cultures". produ...@language can be set using a !(loc.LCID) var (assuming you put a string named LCID in your wxl files). You will need to all ALL of your localized wxl files to your wixproj. Each will be selected based on the wixlocalizati...@culture value. Also there is a fallback mechanism. For instance, I can supply three wxl files (one with @Culture="en-CA", one with @Culture="en-US", and one with @Culture="en") and I can put the stuff that is common between en-CA and en-US into the "en" wxl and the stuff that is different between them will go into the more specific ones. Or, I put everything into the "en" one and selectively override the strings using the specific ones. To do that, I have to make my Cultures property look like this: <Cultures>en-US,en;en-CA,en</Cultures>. For the documentation on all this look for the "Specifying Cultures to Build" topic in the wix.chm file. If you do this, you may want to supply the codepage for the database using the wixlocalizati...@codepage attribute instead of supplying it on the Product element. You can't set the summary codepage this way, but summary codepages can't be utf-8 anyway, so I usually require that summary info (the stuff that is set using the <Package> element) be 7-bit ASCII (a codepage of "0") forcing that to be entirely in English for all packages. -----Original Message----- From: Lian Jiang [mailto:lji...@microsoft.com] Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 7:25 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: [WiX-users] LCID and language/culture fallback Hi, My installer has a wixproj for each culture/locale. For example, I have LCID=1028 for Chinese-Taiwan, LCID=1033 for en-US. However, this requires one wixproj for each culture/locale instead of each language. For example, Chinese-Taiwan culture and Chinese-Hongkong culture cannot share one Chinese traditional language wixproj. English language has much more cultures than Chinese language - it is a pain to create a wixproj for each locale. In my opinion: 1. there is no way to make a wixproj for each language since WIN32 API is locale specific. 2. there is no culture/locale fallback mechanism so that Chinese-Hongkong can fallback to Chinese-Taiway for example. 3. Even there is culture/locale fallback mechanism, it is not safe to fallback due to some political/policy/legal reasons. So I believe it is necessary to create a wixproj for each locale/culture. Please correct me if I am thinking wrong. Thanks Lian ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
