Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset • Hacker News Board

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#21

Post by micovec » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 10:41 AM UTC

I have to agree with others here. It's better to use Wix as a thin layer on top of Windows Installer but the documentation is very, very poor.

I spent a week of trial and error to create an installer just to find out that I had several installations of my app because of some misconfigured xml document from testing. A nightmare to uninstall to say the least.

I highly recommend to test your installers inside a VM or you'll screw up your system.

Also good luck if you want custom behaviour from the installer. The documentation for that is far worse than it is for the standard msi installer.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#22

Post by zogomoox » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 11:11 AM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #11

Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.

I can recommend Wixsharp (https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp), you no longer have to learn the insane wix xml syntax to create an installer.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#23

Post by Kwpolska » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 11:32 AM UTC

sanqui wrote: post #14

Kwpolska wrote: post #11

Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.

I wasn't able to figure it out. The docs [1] have absolutely no information or overview on how the tool works, or how you should get started with creating a simple installer. Besides setup instructions, it only has details on individual sub components, beginning with with "Burn bundles". All linked tutorials are for previous versions of WiX. Is the expected workflow that I read a v3 tutorial and then read the "v4 for…

My favourite page is "Specifying source files" [0], which seems like an important thing for an installer, but all this page contains is:

> To be written. To volunteer, leave a comment at the related issue on GitHub.

If you start with Visual Studio, create a project with their (free) plugin, and configure Heat [1], you might get a working installer.

[0]: https://wixtoolset.org/docs/tools/payloads/

[1]: https://wixtoolset.org/docs/tools/heat/

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#24

Post by ptx » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 11:37 AM UTC

croes wrote: post #19

Kwpolska wrote: post #11

Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.

Maybe we should try LLMs to generate documentation.

Why not cut out the middleman and have it generate the XML? Or let the LLM generate the MSI database directly, without WiX. (Good luck debugging!)

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#25

Post by aumerle » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

LunicLynx wrote: post #10

aumerle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Or maybe he is just telling how it is. Have you contributed to it or tried?

Yup I have been using it for over a decade, and had nothing but pleasant interactions with the maintainer. I am heartily sick of this culture of entitled people that think it is OK to free load on someone else's hard work and then take a public dump on them, that too while hiding behind an alias! And then there are people like you that enable such behavior instead of calling it out.

Mensching, the maintainer here, has been maintaining this free and open source software for twenty years!! A gift to the world. The least he is owed is a little goddamn respect.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#26

Post by RajT88 » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:12 PM UTC

bobince wrote: post #15

issafram wrote: post #12

I remember having to use it at an employer many many years ago. The documentation was horrible and nothing was intuitive about the XML.

Yeah it's a thin layer over MSI tables, so if you don't already know how Windows Installer works then it's not at all clear how to do many seemingly-basic installer tasks. And few people really know how Windows Installer works because that is itself obscure, poorly designed and documented. But a thin layer over MSI is actually what you want; the commercial tools that preceded WiX and tried to abstract away what Windo…

Agree. Learning windows installer is bananas because it is super unintuitive.

Intentionally so in parts, because they do not want you to interact with it outside the API.

Example: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/msifileh...

You could be forgiven for not catching on that this table is just using slightly obfuscated MD5 hashes.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#27

Post by jasonjayr » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

micovec wrote: post #21

I have to agree with others here. It's better to use Wix as a thin layer on top of Windows Installer but the documentation is very, very poor. I spent a week of trial and error to create an installer just to find out that I had several installations of my app because of some misconfigured xml document from testing. A nightmare to uninstall to say the least. I highly recommend to test your installers inside a VM or yo…

I recently learned about the "Windows Sandbox"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

Perfect for testing things that might screw up a Windows system in a 'clean' environment.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#28

Post by 3seashells » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

nray wrote: post #5

When Microsoft launched the (let's face it, baroque) complexity that is Windows Installer (MSI), we didn't get the WiX Toolset, instead we got an expensive proprietary profiling tool for capturing before/after snapshots, and an entry-level version bundled on the Windows 2000 CD which didn't really solve anybody's problem. No suprises then that the MSI format didn't immediately take over, and Microsoft would presume a…

[dead]

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#29

Post by nullindividual » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

sanqui wrote: post #14

Kwpolska wrote: post #11

Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.

I wasn't able to figure it out. The docs [1] have absolutely no information or overview on how the tool works, or how you should get started with creating a simple installer. Besides setup instructions, it only has details on individual sub components, beginning with with "Burn bundles". All linked tutorials are for previous versions of WiX. Is the expected workflow that I read a v3 tutorial and then read the "v4 for…

I used to use WiX for simple app deployments (create Programs File folder, dump assets) and Windows Services. The v3 documentation is decent for this. https://wixtoolset.org/docs/v3/ I’m not sure what development in the MSI world necessitates a radical change in how WiX functions, but apparently that is the case.

orca.exe from one of the older Win SDKs can really help with your understanding of the MSI format, which helps when building for WiX.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#30

Post by mopsi » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #11

Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.

Agreed. Even basic things like detecting if the installer is making a fresh install or upgrading existing installation require arcane condition checks: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/320921/how-to-add-a-wix-... And worst of all, all sources I've ever found (including the linked answers) contain at least a few mistakes or unhandled cases, so I'm not confident enough to make any improvements. Documentation could really use battle-tested examples from people who understand MSI installers very well.