[wix-users] Bundle Rollback with Major Upgrade of packages

[Matthias Reuss]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for your answer. From my experience, I agree that multi-package MSI transactions do not provide a good solution either.

In my opinion, repair of the old bundle cannot be more than a workaround - the user has to trigger it once he has detected that the state of the products is worse than before and something is really missing.

Thus I still cannot understand why Burn treats major-upgraded packages in a different way than minor-upgraded ones when it comes to a bundle rollback.

Best regards

Matthias Reuss

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Rob Mensching <rob at firegiant.com> 
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 26. Mai 2021 20:55
An: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Cc: Matthias Reuss <matthias.mr.reuss at wsa.com>
Betreff: RE: Bundle Rollback with Major Upgrade of packages

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Outside of multi-package MSI transactions*, repair of the old bundle is expected to fix things up. The PackageCache should have everything needed so no source prompts are needed (unless you explicitly chose to not cache your bundle's packages).

* Historical note: Way back when Burn was being developed, teams at Microsoft that tried to use MSI transactions were finding *lots* of bugs. That massively reduced confidence in the feature and pushed it out of Burn v3. It never became a high priority to verify if the MSI transactions feature eventually worked.

-----Original Message-----
From: wix-users <wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Matthias Reuss via wix-users
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2021 10:14 AM
To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Cc: Matthias Reuss <matthias.mr.reuss at wsa.com>
Subject: [wix-users] Bundle Rollback with Major Upgrade of packages

Hi,

I do not see a consistent way to handle the case that an MSI package within a bundle rolls back. I am not talking about the package that experiences an error and is rolled back by Windows Installer, but about the packages installed before that.

My expected outcome (others may have other expectations...):
On fresh installation: Non-shared MsiPackages are removed, shared packages (at least packages for which Burn has detected another dependency) are either set back to their previous state (I know that Burn cannot accomplish that...) or kept in their updated version.
On upgrade of the bundle: All previous MsiPackages are either set back to their previous state (with objection as above) or kept in their updated version.

What I observe:

In the planning phase, both "fresh install" and MajorUpgrade packages are planned with "Rollback:Uninstall" (regardless of dependencies). MinorUpgrade packages are planned with Rollback:None. This planning is then executed regardless of any dependencies (even though Burn detected the dependencies in the Detect phase).

This means in practice that every MsiPackage that was installed with another bundle (shared) or with an older version of the same bundle and now gets rolled back because of a failure in a later package is removed if the ProductCode changed with respect to the previous installed version, thus leaving the system in a real mess. Of course, repair of the other bundle(s) may help if sources are available, but...

RollbackBoundaries are not a real help either, because they also prevent the rollback of a fresh installation. I do not see a way to get the desired/expected behaviour (as stated above), not even with the CustomBA.

Am I missing something here?

Best regards

Matthias Reuss

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