Whoaaaa (squealing brakes) Sorry please don't get me wrong, I'm *NOT*
complaining about it here. Rereading that I can see how the word
"hypocrisy" could lead to an assumption about the overall tone and I
should have inserted a smiley to clearly convey that that was meant to
be a friendly poke in the ribs.
I'm just asking if there's any wix authoring support for it. It was
pointed out that it was discouraged/undocumented which I wanted to
counter point because I didn't want that to too heavily (negatively)
influence anyone's thoughts about potentially adding such support if it
not there already.
I am quite aware of the fact that wix support for it may go along way
towards generating more traction for it and ensuring that it did not
disappear in the future and that that might be a *BAD* thing. I would be
quite elated if the answer was no we don't support it and we don't ever
intend to because we've come up with a much better solution.
Maybe those of you more intimately familiar with msi and the wix tool
set already have much better alternate suggestions in mind or already in
place for achieving the same thing that would make support for that
method a completely moot point.
Perhaps a shell msi which is nothing more that a bunch of individual
localized msis stored as binary blobs and a custom action to extract the
correct one and run it? That might be much more flexible while at the
same time avoid the transform limitations Derek pointed out and the
codepage problems Chesong pointed out. Perhaps this would be tragically
inefficient but you have much better ideas...
What I'm faced with is trying to come up with a single multi language
installer. The guys who do the java versions of our product have an
install shield based one for all the non windows platforms so our
production guys are asking for the same from us for the .NET version of
our product. They are mentally operating at the sku/download level so
they don't care about fantastic msi advantages over the install support
for other platforms or what our customers who are installing the java
stuff on windows anyway are losing by not using an msi based install
shield installer. No many how many bats I bring to the game I can't beat
that sense into them.
At the moment what I have to work with is a VS deployment project
generated msi and a bunch of script that does post processing work on it
hammering in additional ui buttons that invoke ca's, radio buttons that
control conditionally skipping dialog sequences, patches to fix up
silent install, etc, etc, etc. Believe me the process is exactly as
hideous and fragile as you are imagining while you push back from your
keyboard and cringe. I also have everything I think I need to put into
the new installer, including all the localized versions of the installer
strings. Now I'm faced with piling more investment into this steaming
pile or taking a new tact. So I am VERY aware that I am the one asking
you guys for help.
Also although I'm a newbie here I have taken the time to read almost
every msg posted on this list for the 60 or so days so I know that
everyone that contributes is doing so voluntarily and that you and Derek
must spend tons of hours doing so between both advancing the wix code
base and trying to helpfully answer questions here. I have spent lots of
hours volunteering on various ASP.NET and continuous integration things
so I can truly appreciate what you're doing and I am very thankful for
both of your contributions as well as those of others who's names I'm
not yet familiar with yet.
Appologies for the misunderstanding and many thanks for the great work,
commitment, and effort.
-john
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Mensching [mailto:***@users.sourceforge.net]
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 9:13 AM
To: John Lemire; WiX-users
Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Multi-language msi
So why don't you go send a comment from the Windows Installer team's
blog
and tell them to document the feature or quit using it themselves?
Complaining to the volunteers that work on the WiX toolset won't do you
nearly as much good as commenting directly. It might make you feel
better
but it certainly doesn't motivate me because there isn't anything we can
do
in the WiX toolset to document undocumented Windows Installer features.
That said I have passed on the localization challenges that people have
brought up here to the Windows Installer team several times. However,
it is
easy for teams at Microsoft to view me as "just one person".
Want better odds that your issues get addressed? Get a number of people
that agree together and together try to convince the responsible team to
address your needs.
-----Original Message-----
From: wix-users-***@lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:wix-users-***@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of John
Lemire
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 08:04
To: WiX-users
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Multi-language msi
Yes the hypocrisy of which is not lost on us as Microsoft uses this
exceptionally handy feature itself (in the windows installer installer
instmsi.exe no less) while discouraging it and leaving it
undocumented...