WiX was designed to support very large installer projects, with a design goal of distributed setup authoring. To support this idea, WiX supports Fragments.
A Fragment is just a section of setup authoring. Loosely, candle compiles source files containing one or more Fragments into .wixobj files, and light links one or more .wixobj files into a final installer/merge module/patch. One, and only one, of the sections of an installation must be a Product, PatchCreation, or Module. candle and light are very much modelled after a C/C++ Compiler and Linker respectively. It took me a while to work out that the first letter of each tool's name indicates its purpose (Candle = compiler, Light = linker, Lit = library tool, Dark = decompiler, Heat = 'harvester', Pyro = patch builder, Torch = transform creation). You can keep .wixobj files between sessions if the corresponding source file hasn't changed, which may reduce build time (although most of the cost is in binding and validating the MSI rather than processing the source files). A traditional C compiler would only operate on a single source file per run, but like Microsoft's cl.exe, candle accepts multiple source files on the same command line. You should probably consider defining one Fragment per logical component (not necessarily Component) of your product. Just like C# and C++ classes, you can have more than one Fragment per source file, but it may be more understandable if you stick to one Fragment per source file. Splitting your installation into more source files reduces the chance of checkout/merge collisions with multiple developers. In general, Fragments are much nicer to work with than merge modules. -- Mike Dimmick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Collins, James Sent: 25 July 2007 19:35 To: Bob Arnson; Jeroen Davelaar Cc: WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Msi inside msi ? Hey Jeroen, I'm also not sure what your trying to achieve however for me I have very large installers including well over 16k files. For me I need to split that up to reduce build time as well as keeping things modular. The way I do that is with Merge Modules (MSM) which is basically an installer inside an installer. Jimbo -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob Arnson Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 8:27 AM To: Jeroen Davelaar Cc: WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Msi inside msi ? Jeroen Davelaar wrote: > How is it possible to nest a msi file with Orca while it is nog possible to do the same thing with WiX? > WiX deprecated the functionality when the MSI team deprecated it. -- sig://boB http://joyofsetup.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
