Rob's "manual digital automation system" -- where "digital" refers to fingers -- didn't quite get around to sending mail notifying everyone of today's meeting. So while we didn't have a thundering horde of viewers watching the live stream, we nonetheless managed to attract someone new, who'd never attended before. I'll call that a win!

Issue triage

  • Burn doesn't detect related MSIs from language specific Upgrade row, from @rseanhall, suggests that Burn has a gaping bug in its detection of major-upgrade related packages. It might even be a bug that exists in Burn v3, amplified by WiX v4 matching product language during major upgrades when using the MajorUpgrade element. I volunteered to investigate.

  • LogonAsService Privilege is removed after major upgrade , from @ognamala, is one of a couple of possibly-related issues in WixUtilExtension's support for creating, removing, and updating user accounts, specifically around upgrades and rollbacks. The user-creation custom actions are slightly complicated because removing a user can't be rolled back: That would require storing the account credentials; if it were possible to just ask Windows for a user's password, that might be a minor security vulnerability. So we took this bug in WiX v4.x with a note that a WIP is required because of the various complexities.

Questions and comments

Sean brought up the idea of restricting the burn tag on issues to the Burn engine itself, as opposed to the rest of the toolset that builds bundles. I took that opportunity to wax poetic -- trochaic tetrameter, which is tough to pull off on the fly -- on the sad state of our issue tags. We have lots of duplication, some of which was intentional, and some of which is exacerbated by WiX v4 eliminating separate Candle.exe and Light.exe tools in favor of the top-level wix.exe build tool.

We didn't make any major decisions but agreed it's something we should spend some time on, after WiX v4 has shipped and we have a little bit of breathing room.