[wix-users] Components Advice

[Walter Dexter]

Thanks! I was hoping someone else might see a better solution.

Likely going to be a 2020 problem. I think I have two more work weeks this
year.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 5:47 PM Edwin Castro <egcastr at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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