MSI does a handful of things very well at the expense of just about everything else. They'll never say it's a flaw, they'll just say that's how it works.
The reality is the upgrade/component rules are a PITA and require great discipline to implement. I guess that's why Rob posted a thread the other day saying that they choose Major Upgrades for WiX since they don't follow the component rules on a daily basis. ( This has basically been my philosophy for the last 5 years ... aka Major Upgrades "Don't" suck ). In the times that I've choosen to support minor upgrades, I wrote an MSbuild task for TFS that reads an xml file that contains a list of deprecated components. For each file, it creates a 0 byte file ( since the upstream build doesn't generate it anymore ) and then updates the installer source to mark the component as transitive and assign it a no-op condition. It's a pain, but it does work. --- On Tue, 12/30/08, John Robbins <j...@wintellect.com> wrote: > From: John Robbins <j...@wintellect.com> > Subject: Re: [WiX-users] WIX 3 - Suggestions > To: "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." > <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> > Date: Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 12:46 AM > My Paraffin tool does keep the same GUIDs for the files when > you run it repeatedly. For the itch I was trying to scratch > was for projects that were always adding files not removing > files. > > As Bob points out, removing files is the problem. I've > found two discussions that talk about removing files. The > first is here: > http://trentm.com/blog/archives/2007/05/29/wix-and-msp/. The > idea is you replace the <File> element with a > <RemoveFile> like the following: > > <Component Id='AnotherFile' > > Guid='C7D97EA9-83DF-4B07-8E38-D10A30F70FD2'> > <RemoveFile Id='RemoveFile' > On='install' Name='NewFile.txt'/> > </Component> > > In my installers, I'm using patches to upgrade and the > above trick does work. > > The second is discussed here: > http://geekswithblogs.net/Vagmi.Mudumbai/archive/2006/06/11/81426.aspx, > which involves some interesting jujitsu of transitive bit on > the component and create a zero byte file. I don't even > know how to express that in WiX format. :) > > Not being much of an installer guru (I'm still at the > stare in confused stage) I've wondered if either of > these are both good ideas. If so, I could add the > appropriate option to Paraffin to handle the removed file > case. > > If there are no good solutions for the removed files > problem does that mean that there's a flaw in the > installer technology? > > John > Wintellect > http://www.wintellect.com > 877-968-5528 > > > >-----Original Message----- > >From: Bob Arnson [mailto:b...@joyofsetup.com] > >Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 7:04 PM > >To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML > toolset. > >Subject: Re: [WiX-users] WIX 3 - Suggestions > > > >Rob Mensching wrote: > >> For Components with one file each... maybe. > It's the closest we've > >come. Still experimental (one reason it isn't > documented well). > >> > > > >It breaks down whenever files are removed, which is a > problem especially > >for Web apps. > > > >-- > >sig://boB > >http://joyofsetup.com/ > > > > > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >------ > >_______________________________________________ > >WiX-users mailing list > >WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > >https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
