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Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

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Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#61

Post by aumerle »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #58
aumerle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ha…

When you try to contribute to a project and the maintainer just says something isn’t a bug and won’t tell you why and blows you off. They are hostile. So while he’s built an awesome tool. He’s obviously a difficult person.

Says you. Hiding behind an alias at that. If you want to attack a real person in public, at least have the courage to use your real name to do it. And add a link to where he "brushed you off" without reasons so the rest of us can see for ourselves. Failing that, I am going with you wanted the project to do something, the maintainer didn't agree. That's his perogative doesn't make him hostile. He is not obligated to entertain your use cases. When you contribute to someone else's project you do so in the understanding that they get to decide whether to accept your contributions or not.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#62

Post by hypercube33 »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #48

To those who complain about the poor documentation: that's the whole point. The maintainer offers consulting services ($5,000/yr.). It is in his interest that users should need his help. It's worth it for commercial customers. It's a fair business model for an Open Source project.

Really the dig should be on Microsoft -- I had to hand write an xml for WiX to push out a small single exe project and if I had hair left I'd have ripped it clear out -- how is making an MSI file harder than say NSIS or innosetup? I get their toolage is for visual studio projects but I wrote this outside of that so I'm on my own.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#63

Post by hypercube33 »

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.

I actually got a working WiX MSI only because of GPT helping make 90% of the installer. the rest were random stack exchange posts because the docs or guides I found to write the XML were way off, old, too new for wix3 or something else was absolutely missing.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#65

Post by throwaway2990 »

aumerle wrote: post #61
throwaway2990 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you try to contribute to a project and the maintainer just says something isn’t a bug and won’t tell you why and blows you off. They are hostile. So while he’s built an awesome tool. He’s obviously a difficult person.

Says you. Hiding behind an alias at that. If you want to attack a real person in public, at least have the courage to use your real name to do it. And add a link to where he "brushed you off" without reasons so the rest of us can see for ourselves. Failing that, I am going with you wanted the project to do something, the maintainer didn't agree. That's his perogative doesn't make him hostile. He is not obligated to e…

When a maintainer doesn’t want something that’s totally fine if he doesn’t be a cunt about it.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#66

Post by aumerle »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #65
aumerle wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says you. Hiding behind an alias at that. If you want to attack a real person in public, at least have the courage to use your real name to do it. And add a link to where he "brushed you off" without reasons so the rest of us can see for ourselves. Failing that, I am going with you wanted the project to do something, the maintainer didn't agree. That's his perogative doesn't make him hostile. He is not obligated to e…

When a maintainer doesn’t want something that’s totally fine if he doesn’t be a cunt about it.

At this point, you are the one being the cunt.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#67

Post by throwaway2990 »

aumerle wrote: post #66
throwaway2990 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a maintainer doesn’t want something that’s totally fine if he doesn’t be a cunt about it.

At this point, you are the one being the cunt.

Why because your belovered maintainer is hostile and you can cope?

There are tons of maintainers out there who have poor communication skills who don’t care if you submit a pull request fixing a bug, or raise an issue detailing a bug. They will shrug you off and make you feel like OSS is a waste of time.

Get over yourself and stop getting on your knees to suck him off like he’s some god.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#68

Post by aumerle »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #67
aumerle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, you are the one being the cunt.

Why because your belovered maintainer is hostile and you can cope? There are tons of maintainers out there who have poor communication skills who don’t care if you submit a pull request fixing a bug, or raise an issue detailing a bug. They will shrug you off and make you feel like OSS is a waste of time. Get over yourself and stop getting on your knees to suck him off like he’s some god.

You must be really hurting. Have a cookie.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#69

Post by burnte »

nray wrote: post #54
burnte wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your experience is, but in the vast majority of enterprise AD forests, most apps are deployed by MSI and have been for quite a while. MSI actually took off really quickly, and most installer kits shrank a lot, many disappearing. These days most of the remaining large commercial installer kits generate MSIs as well as EXEs.

In my experience large Microsoft customers deployed applications with SCCM, now perhaps moving to Intune. Distributing MSIs via group policy is fairly primitive compared to what endpoint management platforms can offer. But my point was that large commercial installer kits were always required to produce MSIs, in the absence of something like the WiX Toolset.

Using SCCM doesn't preclude MSIs at all. MSIs via group policy are probably used 1000x more often than SCCM.

Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

#70

Post by ptx »

sebazzz wrote: post #64
ptx wrote: post #52

If you only need the basics, you can also use GNOME's msitools[0], which use the same XML format as WiX but don't require Windows to build the MSI package. [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/msitools

Isn’t WiX 4 now cross-platform, the SDK at least?

Is it? All I see about platforms in the release notes is in the context of different processor architectures.

To run WiX you would presumably also need the Windows Installer libraries that are part of Windows, which I suspect are not cross-platform. Msitools uses Wine's implementation instead.

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