[wix-users] Components Advice

[Edwin Castro]

I suspect your intuition is correct. You'll need to deliver the entire
component in newer.msi. Since the key path is FILE1 you'll need some
mechanism to ensure the components in newer.msi are "newer" than the ones
in older.msi. The refcount will be updated but your newer files should not
get replaced by the older files.

--
Edwin G. Castro


On Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 15:17 Walter Dexter via wix-users <
wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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