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Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

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Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#31

Post by kiike »

viraptor wrote: post #13
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.

Same, but I just gave up after 2 days. I really wish there was a one-click option in VS.net to create an installer that checks/pulls the required version of runtime, installs the target exe, all its DLL dependencies, and all custom files marked for release. It's what 99.9% of apps need, so why is there no "do the defaults" path? You even need to pass things through the Heat generator to get multiple resulting files l…

I'm not a developer for Windows apps but had to use WiX to generate an installer for a Python open source project I am collaborating with. Installing one binary in a specific location? Easy. Couple hundred files distributed among multiple nested directories? That was a miserable experience and but I could manage to pull it off. I didn't use heat. The XML was hand-coded and the file listing was generated with a Python script that walked the directory tree and generated the Directory, Component and ComponentGroup entries.

Apparently with Wix4, heat is deprecated, unneeded in Wix5. I couldn't even get it to install and have the executable. So confusing!

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#32

Post by nray »

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'm wondering how much of the frustration in the comments here is due as much to the arcane design of the Windows Installer format as to shortfalls in WiX and its documentation. I would say that you need a good understanding of MSI databases before trying to use WiX, which implies thinking about the installer while developing the app, which was the goal of the toolkit.

Packaging can be hard on any platform but Microsoft really outdid itsself with MSI. If you already have a finished product and just need to package it then NSIS or Inno were much simpler to pick up.

Many products are released as MSI files because that's what enterprise deployment tooling supported, but inside is a setup executable, which defeats the entire transactional rollback design of the thing.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#33

Post by klabb3 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #20
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 switched from wix to NSIS. It's not perfect but it's certainly a lot easier, and whatever problem you may have, the solution is usually only a Google search away.

I’ve been keeping a pulse on Tauri for a long time. They’re thinking the same, I believe, because they are trying to move over.

And Wix is just installation on one out of 5-6 platforms. Native development is so convoluted and riddled with complexity. Linux though is no exception, since this it’s a distro issue. MacOS is generally much better, with fewer moving pieces – most of the overhead is from notarizing and signing…

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#34

Post by StrauXX »

tichiian wrote: post #17

Needs a name change. Absolute no-go in Germany, because the name means "wank".

No matter which term you use, its gonna mean something "bad" in some language. And besides, another company, also called wix (a graphical website builder), used that exact fact in Germany/Austria/Switzerland to make a big marketing campaign.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#35

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#39

Post by superkuh »

anonzzzies wrote: post #4
kome wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, from the title i was absolutely convinced that he was talking about https://www.wix.com/

I indeed clicked it because I thought that as well.

Same. I was confused that anyone would be proud of Wix. It builds the most terrible websites I've ever encountered. They literally require sequential loading of javascripts from something like 5 different domains.

Here's my experience loading a wix site: First load: nothing, so I enable javascript execution for base domain. This requests scripts from a second domain which when allowed manually requires scripts from a third domain which when loaded requires scripts to execute from a fourth domain. By this time I've closed the tab.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#40

Post by dyerjohn »

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.

LOL! I was asking Gemini Wix questions. The answers were wrong! When I pointed that out I got apologies and more code that didn't work. As with most newbies, I finally trial and error'ed my way out. I want to know how the "experts" have figured out how to use Wix. What is it that I should know but don't about learning Wix?
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