[wix-users] Components Advice

[Walter Dexter]

I have two existing MSIs that both get installed to the same Windows server.

I'm going to call them "older.msi" and "newer.msi." Right now, every server
has both "older.msi" and "newer.msi" installed.

Most of what "Older.msi" delivers is now obsolete, so I want to stop
distributing it soon.

There are a few files in "older.msi" that are still relevant, and I want to
move them to "newer.msi."

These files are in "older.msi" components like this:

<Component Id="blah" Guid="{GUID-GOES-HERE}">
    <File Id="FILE1" Source="file1.txt" KeyPath="yes" />
    <File Id="FILE2" Source="file2.txt" KeyPath="no" />
</Component>

There are 15 Components with this same basic structure. The file that I
want to move to "newer.msi" is uniformly, like FILE2 in my example,
KeyPath="no".

We have an installed plant of about 13,500 geographically dispersed servers
at our retail locations across the United States, so stuff just needs to
work.

What should I do here?

A new "older.msi" hasn't been released for at least 4 years but various
home-grown software deployment tools continue to send it out automagically,
as well as professional installers with it on thumb drives, so I have to
assume that it might accidentally be installed again after "newer.msi" is
installed.

I'm thinking maybe I should just put another copy of the full component
from "Older.msi" into "newer.msi" with both File2.txt and a mostly empty
File1.txt - the presence of File1.txt doesn't hurt anything, it just isn't
needed any more.

I wish I'd put each file in its own component when I created Older.msi 5
years ago but I can't unring that bell.

(Note - I've oversimplified here; these are actually scripts in our own
very special, half-broken internal scripting language, and other systems on
the LAN retrieve and use them. It's really ugly.)

Thanks in advance for any advice-

Walt