The US federal government is partially shut down, but the WiX Online Meetings continue apace. Open-source developers are used to working without getting paid.
Issue triage
wix.exe buildwithout output type throws exception, from @barnson, reports a simple crash from WiX v4'swix.exe. I reported it and volunteered to fix it, too.Extensions should version their ids, from @barnson, feeds into a discussion that happened after triage about overall WiX extension versioning. See below for a recap and watch the video for details.
Enable user to change setup language in Burn UI, from @denis-gz, requests a language-selection mechanism for WixStdBA. We'll take the feature into WiX v4.x.
Visual Studio 2019 preview support
The WiX Visual Studio extension (formerly and still sometimes known as Votive) is available for Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. There was concern about posting a preview to Visual Studio Marketplace (if only because that's all on Rob to do). Instead, Rob proposed posting the .vsix in a GitHub release and posting the link to the current downloads page on wixtoolset.org. The motion was carried by a voice vote.
WiX extension versioning
Now that WiX extensions are each in their own microrepo, they can version independently of the other WiX core tools microrepos. Except not really, because the extensions are dependent on, at least, the Extensibility and Data repos and breaking changes in those repos (such as for the next major release of WiX) would break compatibility with the extensions. So we decided to include the corresponding major version of WiX in the NuGet package identity. The exact format needs some designing, if only to not look too ugly, but we can do that on the wix-devs mailing list where we can actually see the variants, not just hear them.
History and release notes
A capability we had in WiX v3.x was having the "release notes" written for each change formatted and aggregated into one History.md Markdown file. That was helpful in WiX v3.x, where there's a single thing you download to install, but is less helpful with the microrepo model of WiX v4. (As someone who used to earn a living as a writer, I'll also add that a list of individual changes might not be the most useful form of release notes.) We discussed alternatives and in the end, decided that embracing the GitHub monoculture lets us tie pull requests and issues together and with milestones and labels, we have the tools we need to track changes. And perhaps a human who's decent with words will volunteer to turn those into release notes.