My company moved to using msi around a year and I authored a major product
release and subsequent patch files (small update msp's that do not increment
the baseline version) using wix. The product contains a number of binary
files. Recently we had an issue where the customer manually replaced a couple
of the binary files (.pdb) in the Program Files install area. Now, there was a
later issue which meant that they wanted to go back to the latest installed
version so we suggested just doing a "Repair" of the product from the control
panel... Unfortunately the repair had no effect on the binary files and did not
replace them with the version in the latest installed product.
After some research I find that if I manually run a repair with the /fo flag
(the default), the files are not replaced, but if I run it with /fd, they are
replaced as expected.
The help says
o - Reinstalls if file is missing or an older version is installed.
d - Reinstalls if file is missing or a different version is installed.
My questions are:
- Why didn't msiexec realise the file was different based on the
differing timestamp
- More worrying, when doing a repair from the control panel, the
repair clearly fails for all/some of the files, but we get no error message.
Should we tell the client to always run it from the command line? Can we build
this option into the original msi and what are the downsides of this?
- Clearly the customer is breaking some best practises by overwriting
files in the Program Files area but I did expect they would be safe because the
repair would work. Are there some rules we can give to the customer to follow
in the future?
Any help is appreciated (especially because I know this is really a MSI issue
and not a Wix one).
Regards
sanjay
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