WiX Online Meeting #189 Highlights

There was plenty to talk about at today's meeting, including talking about new ways we might want to handle discussions in the future.

Issue triage

Bundle with detached container duplicates MSI’s external cab files, from @nirbar, reports a bug when mixing attached and detached containers in a bundle. Detached containers aren’t often used so triage decided that this bug didn’t rise to a red alert level for fixing in WiX v3.14 and we’d take it in WiX v4.0.
Add new element(s) for custom BA data and BE data, from @rseanhall, complete with a WIP, for a way of specifying data for custom bootstrapper applications and extensions.
heat.exe changes file permissions, from @gquerret, reports a potential bug with Heat.exe that turned out to be an oddity in how a particular COM server handles self-registration.
Allow to harvest files with the same name but different extension, from @paulomorgado, complete with accepted pull request, reports a problem when using the HarvestFile MSBuild support for harvesting with Heat.exe.
Add ARM(32) Burn, from @rseanhall, is a reminder that WiX v3 used to support 32-bit ARM CPUs on Windows RT. Given the moribund state of support for 32-bit ARM, we decided not to move forward with support for it without clear customer demand.
Add ARM64 Burn, from @rseanhall, however, is all about the very-much-alive-and-interesting 64-bit ARM that is widely supported by Windows. We took this in WiX v4.0 with the plan to support 64-bit Burn soon.

Discussion discussion

We spent some time discussing the state of the art of discussions, as a possible replacement for the mailing lists we’ve used, known, and loved(?) for WiX’s 16 years. GitHub’s recent announcement of support for discussions prompted us to discuss whether it’s time to give up mailing lists. We decided it’s worth considering once we have more information. Sean and Rob are working to get onto the Discussions beta so we can learn more.