Welcome to the fourth quarter of calendar year 2020. As hard as it is to believe, time is still passing at a normal rate and eventually 2020 will be over. Today, triage was brief and we're done triaging issues for WiX v4.0 Preview Zero, so we spent most of the meeting instead discussing open issues that are part of Preview Zero.

Issue triage

  • WiX v3.11.2. doesn't include VS2019 SDK, from @voguhl, is asking about the lack of Visual Studio 2019-compatible native libraries in WiX v3.11. As WiX v3's build system requires us-the-WiX-developers to explicitly add support for each major version of Visual Studio, we didn't do that for Visual Studio 2019 in WiX v3 because it wasn't required: Visual Studio 2019 is backward-compatible with libraries created with Visual Studio 2017.

  • Driver installation on ARM64 does not work, from @eloi-loomai, reports that WiX v3.14's support for ARM64 doesn't extend to support for installing ARM64 drivers. Sadly, that's true. WixDifxAppExtension relies on custom actions that were provided by Microsoft's DifxApp tooling. Unfortunately, DifxApp was never updated for ARM64 (that we know of) and was deprecated back in 2016. So unless Microsoft gets back into the DifxApp business, the current extension can't support ARM64. We're keeping the issue open to add a warning in the WixDifxAppExtension compiler extension when building for unsupported platforms.

  • Burn does not pass restart flags to related bundles, from @nirbar, suggests that Burn should prevent related bundles (including the most common case of a bundle being upgraded) from restarting; instead, all restart behavior should be managed by the parent bundle. The team seems in agreement that it's the best behavior but need to cogitate on the myriad ways related bundles are used. Because it's a behavior change, we took the issue into WiX v4.0.

WiX v4 design discussions

Having finished triage of potential issues for Preview Zero of WiX v4.0 last week -- we're down to 37 bugs to hit Preview Zero -- this week we dedicated meeting time to discuss issues that have languished a bit on the wix-devs mailing list. Well, that was the plan; in the end, Rob and Sean spent an hour discussing semantic versioning in Burn. If that's the kind of thing that intrigues you -- and why wouldn't it? -- please enjoy the playback above.