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Brook Roberts
Brook Roberts

Reputation: 5

Can I use Wix to make patches for major upgrades?

I'm looking to start using patches with an existing product. At the moment the product Id is autogenerated. Having looked through some online resources it's not clear to me whether I can just start using patches.

  1. Since the Product Id of the existing release is not known (since it was autogenerated) - I presume I have no choice but for my next upgrade to be a major upgrade?

  2. Am I correct in thinking that it is unwise for a major upgrade to be made as a patch? This implies you can make major upgrades into patches but this seems to imply it's a bad idea, although I'm not really sure why.

Assuming my next upgrade has to be major, and major upgrades shouldn't be patches, is my best course of action (since I want the ability to use patches in the future) to make the next upgrade a major one which changes the product Id to a known constant (until the next big change) and use patches after that?

Thanks a lot for any help.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 205

Answers (1)

Christopher Painter
Christopher Painter

Reputation: 55620

Windows Installer supports Major Upgrade Patches and here is a discussion:

Major Upgrade Patches

However, WiX does not support it:

Restrictions for Patches

Perhaps the doco is old. That would be a good question for the WiX-Users mailing list. I've done some searching and can't find any topics that talk about what those problems are. I'm unfamiliar as it's not a strategy that I've ever wanted to use.

Upvotes: 1

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