Today we triaged one issue and discussed one design question. Each took about half the meeting, which is just a happy coincidence.

Issue triage

  • Add to the registry of startup as the default configuration on WiX/Burn installation , it could be changed later, from @BluceBosen, requests the ability to control when/if/how Burn uses the RunOnce registry key to restart the bundle after a mid-chain reboot, power loss, cosmic ray mutations, and so on. Burn's use of RunOnce sometimes triggers antivirus monitors and blocks the bundle, or sometimes more rudely, terminates the process entirely. Even though the RunOnce registry key is exactly how Burn should get restarted after a reboot. Unfortunately, it is also apparently a mechanism used by malware. It turns out that "getting infected by malware" is another way of saying "installing malware." Consequently, antimalware products are paranoid about perfectly benign operations by genuine installers. We doubt other approaches of handling restart-after-reboot would survive paranoid antimalware software any better than RunOnce. I opened a new issue to collect our discussion and to have one place to discuss alternatives, should someone propose something that still handles restart-after-reboot like RunOnce.

Design discussion

Today we talked about Cancel during EXE package doesn't rollback the package, from @nirbar, following up some earlier discussion on the wix-devs mailing list. The primary question was whether we should attempt to uninstall an ExePackage during rollback. The primary answer is yes, which prompts additional, secondary questions, like do we need to offer an option to terminate an ExePackage that is taking long enough that we suspect it's actually hung and if so, how long is "long enough," and should we even wait at all? Expect additional issues to highlight some of these questions.