> -----Original Message----- > From: Markus Karg [mailto:k...@quipsy.de] > Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2010 7:37 AM > To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. > Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Searching for existing files but only once > > > I assure you, all of us were beginners once.<g> And, of course, > > learning > > WiX is almost trivial; it's MSI that's hard. > > That's not true in one point: WiX comes with lots of stuff that has > nothing to do with MSI. See the extensions. Maybe somebody write a > brilliant custom task that does what we need, but he did not contribute > it but just put it somewhere in some foreign place. How should we learn > about that without asking? And where to ask if not here? I mean, we did > *not* ask "How to solve that with 100% pure MSI?". We described just > our > problem: We want to have a DirectoryScan run only once. but we do not > want to write it completely from scratch. It is a valid solution (and
[Castro, Edwin (Hillsboro)] And the explicit answer to your question is "You can't do that. If you want a DirectoryScan that runs only once *you* need to build it yourself." Did you find the wix-contrib project in your research? How about the msiext project? There are very few projects out there were sharing custom actions (the MSI way of doing non-MSI things) with the rest of the world. One of them happens to be the WiX project. I can only think of two others and I've seen references to both of them in the mailing list in the past. The problem with your question is "but we do not want to write it completely from scratch". You _know_ you need a custom action to achieve your goal because you understand how RegistrySearch and FileSearch, etc, work. They execute on every run. Your question should reflect that you understand already how MSI works and that WiX does not have a standard custom action to do the work for you. It would be nice to show that you've looked at the other two projects that intend to provide open source custom actions, wix-contrib and msiext, and didn't find a custom action that does what you'd like. It would be nice to show to us that you are look for somebody to share their custom action code with you in some way. As far as I could tell none of this information was given unless somebody requested it. > > Sadly, it's becoming more common: Even theoretically smart people who > > understand foundations want to put some work like setup in the "it > > shouldn't be hard, so therefore it isn't hard" bucket and avoid > > planning > > it or even considering it might require some engineering effort. > > On the other hand, as a project manager, I'd love it more if people get > solutions quickly by asking others instead of spending weeks with > trying > things others already proven to be impossible or inefficient. Ain't it > part of the idea of a forum to share experience? Won't you like to just > download a sample code from us when starting with a technology we have > lots of experience with and you have not, just to reduce time to > understand Chapter X from one week to five minutes? At least my > managing > director will kick my ass if he learns that my coders are spending time > with weird experiments if there is someone out there having the answer > in the pocket, but we just didn't dare to ask because we want to > prevent > senseless discussion like this one... [Castro, Edwin (Hillsboro)] If I was a manager I would fire any employee that didn't show an aptitude for learning. With a field that changes as quickly as this one does (seems like everything is obsolete the day before it launched) I would expect everyone to value learning above everything else. If you can't solve the problem today because you have a knowledge gap then you need to fix that pronto or risk getting stuck in an endless cycle of asking your peers to solve your problems for you. There's a _*HUGE*_ difference between asking for advice/help on understanding one aspect of a technology you don't understand and flat out asking for somebody to do your homework. You *should* have asked about projects with open source custom actions and/or anybody who happened to have implemented a solution for your problem and would like to share it with you from the start. You would have gotten, at least, links immediately to wix-contrib (if it has any content now, last time I checked it was very bare) and msiext (this project has a lot more content). That would also have told you that you would need to invest in writing a custom action from scratch because either nobody had done this before or nobody has permission to share their code with the public. As for senseless, I agree this is a senseless discussion in that we shouldn't be having it to begin with. BUT I value learning enough to become disgusted at the sight of a peer behaving like many of my classmates back in college where their goal was simply to get the job done. Next course, they wouldn't have the background, skill, knowledge, etc to even perform the tasks they had "accomplished" in the previous course. They hadn't learned anything. My whole point was if anything, you should learn to ask questions differently. There was one person (now two) that lost their patience with you because of the *way* you ask for help. Not because you _asked_ for help. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
