Welcome to December 2020's first -- but not last -- WiX Online Meeting. We plan to adjust the schedule a bit to fit in a second meeting on Tuesday, 22 December, to encourage 2020 to just get done and over.
Issue triage
Add exe launch utility to the Burn engine for detection purposes, from @japarson, requests the ability to run an .exe to get data into variables as part of Burn's detect phase. Though it's a useful feature in the particular case of being able to run the .NET detection tool, we decided it wasn't generally-enough useful to be "promoted" to be part of the core toolset.
Harvesting .net 5 (core) DLL with .comhost. dll crashes heat, from @nbelyh, reports a Heat crash when harvesting a COM-enabled .NET 5 assembly. The problem turned out to be a .NET bug which the original reporter reported as a .NET issue; Sean followed up with another instance of the same bug; and a Microsoft employee quickly concurred, fixed for .NET 6, and merged for the next release of .NET 5. It was a Festivus miracle!
DefineConstants from project references are duplicated, from @rseanhall, reports a problem with the WiX v4 MSBuild targets when using
ProjectReferences. We put it in the WiX v4.0 milestone.Packages and RollbackBoundaries that aren't scheduled shouldn't be silently ignored, from @rseanhall, suggests that referencing a fragment that includes a package silently ignores that package unless the fragment is referenced via
PackageGroupRefin a bundle'sChain. As Rob pointed out, this situation is analogous to the error emitted when a fragment includes a component but the component isn't parented to a feature. This issue graduated to the WiX v4.0 milestone.
WiX v4 design discussions
Not a lot of movement in the Preview Zero milestone since the last meeting -- we're down minimally to 35 bugs to hit Preview Zero. We discussed the remaining open issue:
After progress stalled discussing the issue asynchronously on the wix-devs mailing list, it was time to discuss it live. In the end, there are at least two issues confusingly conjoined: the confusion a user might see if they peek in Programs and Features when a bundle is still running (before or after a reboot) and the confusion of seeing a Programs and Features entry when they cancel a bundle after rebooting to install the .NET Framework.
So in the end, we decided to treat this as two issues with different fixes.
Discussions discussion
We were able to get the wixtoolset repo enabled for GitHub Discussions...just before they opened it up to everybody. That's fine. Discussions are now available in the issues repo. Rob, Sean, and I think they'll suffice for the questions and discussions we've been holding on the wix-users and wix-devs mailing lists for...well, going on 17 years now. GitHub Discussions support notifications like other parts of GitHub, which addresses one of the weaknesses of Web-based discussions: Knowing when there are new topics and when existing topics get more discussion.
We're hoping that using GitHub Discussions instead of mailing lists will help users by avoiding the need for a registration separate from your GitHub identity we already require to file issues. Also, our mail archives haven't been reliable so having discoverability and search on GitHub should help users find existing topics from the dusty archives that address their modern issues.
But we're looking for feedback before we declare the mailing lists defunct. Please give the GitHub Discussions a look and let us know if you're ready to bid a fond farewell to mailing lists.