Sorry for the delay in response. I've been out of the country then our
whole family was hit by the flu. I'm the last to recover.
I think we should focus on making it easier to build and contribute to the
WiX toolset. I'm not terribly interested in doing work that makes it easier
to appropriate code out of the WiX toolset. That isn't likely to make the
WiX toolset better for everyone.
In that light, I am very interested in understanding what is difficult
about building the WiX toolset?
>From WiX v3.7+ you should only need VS2010 installed (WiX v3.8+ should also
support VS2012 only if you prefer). Then run "msbuild" from the root of the
project and everything will build once. That takes ~5 minutes on
my not-terribly-fast machine. After that, you should be able to build any
sub-directory in less than a minute.
That said there two things I can think of that may be issues:
1. The build should turn off stuff if you don't have the pre-requisites.
Bugs where this is not true are usually found by trial and error since it's
challenging to get build machines in all the different configurations. If
you find that a known good build fails, send email to wix-devs and we'll
help track down what is wrong.
2. There is an opportunity to improve the project dependencies. I did the
migration from NAnt to MSBuild in the early days of WiX v3.7 by myself.
That was over a decade's worth of build system crud that I tried to clean
up in one pass. Since our NAnt build didn't do much of anything with
dependencies, I did not have a lot of data when converting to MSBuild. If
people wanted to follow up and help get project reference dependencies
correct to make it easier to build subsets of the WiX toolset faster, that
would be awesome.
I expect the issues are either experiences with the pre-WiX v3.7 build
system or issues in #1 above. We can fix #1. <smile/>
I'm going to go one step further too. I've just created a branch in the WiX
repository called "devbundle". In that branch, I've started to create a
Bundle that should install all the pre-requisites to building the full WiX
toolset *except* for Visual Studio itself. That way there should be no
question what needs to be installed to build everything in the WiX toolset.
The answer is "Install the WiX Toolset Developer Bundle" (and it will error
if you don't have an appropriate VS installed). This will also help me when
setting up new build machines. <smile/>
Are there other things that would make it easier to build the WiX toolset?
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Neil Sleightholm <[email protected]>wrote:
> >> almost-but-not-quite trivial to build****
>
> ** **
>
> I think that sums it up, it is still not trivial you have to install loads
> of stuff some of which you might not need but who knows. If the extensions
> were standalone it would be obvious what you needed and if the code built
> you would know you had everything to develop just the extension you were
> interested in. The current layout doesn’t even easily load into VS so this
> doesn’t help, it seems to be all or nothing.****
>
> ** **
>
> IMHO lots of lot self-contained extensions is the way to go – someone
> mentioned a “Contrib” concept, I think this would be a good step forward.
> For example, I am sure if you could load the IIS extension solution and it
> referenced the installed libraries people would be more inclined to
> contribute.****
>
> ** **
>
> Just my opinion…****
>
> ** **
>
> Neil****
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* Bob Arnson [mailto:[email protected]]
> *Sent:* 30 January 2013 03:53
>
> *To:* [email protected]
> *Subject:* Re: [WiX-devs] Building WiX Code****
>
> ** **
>
> On 19-Jan-13 18:24, Neil Sleightholm wrote:
>
> ****
>
> I appreciate the issue of splitting the code but in my opinion it would be
> worth it, as I see it it is currently too complex. I have been trying to
> build WiX code for many years and it has never been possible to resubmit my
> changes because the codebase is not structured in a way that makes it easy
> so I have to rely on submitting bugs and hoping you guys can fix them. For
> example, the IIS site code bug, the IIS log folder bug, IIS mine types – I
> solved these years ago but by writing extra code rather than enhancing the
> core code.****
>
> Hence my confusion: Why would making it easier to build isolated parts
> make it easier to contribute to WiX? Granted, it was a PITA to get a build
> machine for WiX <=v3.6 but with the MSBuild work in v3.7, it's
> almost-but-not-quite trivial to build. So build it once and you can hack on
> any part easily.
>
>
> ****
>
> -- ****
>
> sig://boB****
>
> http://joyofsetup.com/****
>
>
>
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