You sacrifice working repair and the ability to patch with that approach (unconditionally installing older files over newer). That would be unacceptable for any of my products.
Also, shared components would blow up in all sorts of unpleasant ways. -- John Merryweather Cooper Build & Install Engineer - ESA Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.® Shawnee Mission, KS 66227 Office: 913-341-3434 x791011 jocoo...@jackhenry.com www.jackhenry.com -----Original Message----- From: Jesper Alf Dam [mailto:j...@medical-insight.com] Sent: Friday, July 11, 2014 9:13 AM To: General discussion about the WiX toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] What problems can occur with versioned companion files? (alternatives for handling file downgrades?) Sorry for the late response. I finally got around to watching the video, and I'm wondering what you would recommend I do instead. My knowledge of WiX and MIS is fairly limited, and our installer doesn't really do anything fancy or unusual (all our upgrades are implemented as major upgrades, and all files are installed to the application's own directory and aren't shared with the system, so we don't have to worry about breaking other applications that might depend on a component we installed. I definitely want to keep our installer as simple and reliable as possible, and if this trick with versioned companion files scares even you, it's probably not the way to go. :) What bothers me is that I don't think the problem I'm trying to fix is an edge case. It seems like what you would typically want in an installer (except when dealing with shared/system-wide files) Most installers are fairly simple, and install the applications' files as a collection which has been tested together and is known to work: If a newer installer says to install an older version of a file (or one which is unversioned where the old one was versioned), 90% of the time you want that choice to be respected. The installer bundled that file for a reason. MSI deciding to not install the file because of its version becomes a big problem then (especially because of its default behavior of removing the old file and skipping the new one, leaving you with neither). In many cases you can just avoid the problem by never downgrading files, but as soon as your product includes third party libraries, you lose direct control of some of your files' versions. If they screw up their versioning, or you have to roll back to an older version of that library, you want the installer to respect that, and install the downgraded file. That seems like the behavior that most simple installers would want (and probably the behavior that their implementers *think* they already have), not an edge case. The trouble is, I can't see a nice way to achieve this. I know of these three options so far: 1. scheduling RemoveExistingProducts before CostInitialize (which generates an ICE) 2. setting INSTALLMODE=amus (which also generates an ICE) 3. eventually I came up with versioned companion files (have files be companions to a single "main" file whose version is in sync with the installer's version), which I agree is an odd approach, but so far, it's the only one I've found that doesn't generate ICE's. It seems to work in the testing I've done, but using an approach that scares the WiX maintainers seems like a bad idea. ;) Conceptually, what I want to achieve is simply that as far as MSI is concerned, all files are considered to have the same version as the installer that installed them. So what is your recommendation? Should I just go for #1, and suppress the consistency check? That's simple enough to do at least, but with my limited knowledge of WiX, I didn't want to just suppress any ICE's on a whim. I figured they're there for a reason, and I didn't want to end up with an installer that might break in mysterious ways further down the road.. Thanks, / Jesper On 20-06-2014 18:13, Rob Mensching wrote: > I'll be uploading the triage meetings to YouTube soon > (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVJeW1mjSujNPfsCQhsg7qQ) where we discuss > this issue. > > It came down to the fact that what you are doing is very unusual. Since it's > so unusual, you should manage the GUID manually. It certainly isn't a design > we'd generally encourage. > > _______________________________________________________________ > FireGiant | Dedicated support for the WiX toolset | > http://www.firegiant.com/ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jesper Alf Dam [mailto:j...@medical-insight.com] > Sent: Friday, June 20, 2014 1:13 AM > To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: [WiX-users] What problems can occur with versioned companion files? > > I recently filed bug 4448, in which the following response was posted: > > Versioned companion files are atypical and would seem to bring their > own problems for upgrades and patching. We don't plan to expand * > GUIDs to cover this case. > > That bug is probably not the right place to ask this, so I'm posting it here > instead: > > What are those problems with upgrades and patching? > > I recently posted a question here about overriding file versions (so that an > installer containing a few third-party files whose versions have decreased > will still install those files over the ones that were already in place when > doing an upgrade), and the solution I settled on (the only one which didn't > require me to suppress one or more consistency checks) was to mark these > files as companions so their own version is disregarded. From what I've been > able to test, that works fine, but the comment above makes me wonder if I'm > missing anything. > > Thanks, > Jesper > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > -------- HPCC Systems Open Source Big Data Platform from LexisNexis > Risk Solutions Find What Matters Most in Your Big Data with HPCC Systems Open > Source. Fast. Scalable. Simple. Ideal for Dirty Data. > Leverages Graph Analysis for Fast Processing & Easy Data Exploration > http://p.sf.net/sfu/hpccsystems > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > -------- HPCC Systems Open Source Big Data Platform from LexisNexis > Risk Solutions Find What Matters Most in Your Big Data with HPCC > Systems Open Source. Fast. Scalable. Simple. 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