WiX Online Meeting 291 Highlights

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

How did you know that my secret birthday wish was for lots of WiX issues to triage and lots of discussion about the past and future of WiX? And you got me horribly frigid weather on top? You shouldn't have. No, really, you shouldn't have. But I'm happy to share. Read on for news and lots of triage.

Retirement

WiX v3 and WiX v4 go out of consumer support the first week of February. The WiX lifecycle lays out the dates and the date formulas used to determine the consumer-support lifetimes. (FireGiant customers get extended support lifetimes because our love language is supporting our customers making great installers.)

Up next

WiX v6 development continues apace. We triaged issues that are targeting WiX v6-rc.1---we moved a couple issues out of v6 and moved a couple of issues into v6. Everything looks good at the moment, but, with two versions of WiX retiring at the same time as our original scheduled date for WiX v6-rc.1, we decided to push that out a week. Its new date is 12-Feb-2025, so set your calendars to pick up that release and run all your WiX v5 code through it. And if you still have WiX v3 or v4 code, WiX v6-rc.1 is a great time to update. Remember that finding bugs happens before release; after WiX v6.0 ships, bugs you find will queue up for WiX v7 next year---except for FireGiant customers; see above paragraph re: love language.

You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here

Everybody loves to complain about documentation. (I started writing back in the olden days when software came with printed manuals---and people complained then too.) WiX v4 changed the schema of the WiX language, so a lot of documentation for WiX v3 appears to be obsolete. (Hint: It’s not, for the most part; there are some highly-visible changes in the WiX language around, for example, Product and Package, but huge swaths of the language are almost completely unchanged.)

With limited resources, Rob and I both have chosen to focus our volunteer time on WiX in areas where having 20 to 25 years of experience in WiX and MSI has the most effect: In WiX itself. Rob wrote about this very topic a long time ago. Thanks to WiX’s open-source license, we’re not in a privileged position when it comes to writing documentation; we’re just more familiar with the material.

One might hope for lots of open-source documentation contributions, but, alas, significant improvements or additions have been rare. So it falls to us and, because some people are blaming FireGiant for the lack of doc, FireGiant is taking on some of that doc challenge. Soon, the WiX documentation will move to a new FireGiant documentation site, which makes it easier for us to combine things like the WiX tutorials with other WiX doc. We’ll take great pains to add redirects so everything keeps flowing.

Moving meetings

Rob proposed moving this meeting forward 25 hours: Instead of the third Tuesday at 0930 Pacific Time, the WiX Online Meeting will now be held on the third Wednesday of every month at 1030 Pacific Time. (Pacific Time right now is UTC-8, but becomes UTC-7 for March’s meeting.) Our February meeting is 19-February at 1030 PST.

Triage

by Bob Arnson on Tuesday, January 21, 2025

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