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If you watch the front page of the WiX toolset's web site and get notifications for changes to the Windows Installer XML News on SourceForge and subscribe to this blog then this is the third time you've seen this content. I apologize for the message in triplicate but there seem to be a surprising number of people that seem to believe that the WiX toolset has been abandoned because there has not been an update to the WiX SourceForge page in a while.
To combat that belief I am posting this notice widely:
There has been some suggestion that the WiX toolset is a dead project because we have not released a drop to the SourceForge release point in a long while. Those fears are unfounded for three reasons. First, WiX v2 is stable so we are not expecting another build of that version unless a showstopper bug shows up. Second, weekly drops show up at the Weekly Releases release point regularly. Finally, pushing to the SourceForge release point is a manual process for us and thus a lower priority. In any case, development is still very much active and the wix-users mailing list is still the best place to get your questions answered.
At the same time, I'm going to re-evaluate whether ignoring the content on the (IMHO) "fugly" SourceForge pages is a good idea. The freshness of the data presented there makes a larger first impression than I anticipated.
7 Comments
Comment by isol on Thursday, January 31, 2008 9:34 PM
Comment by Rob Mensching on Thursday, January 31, 2008 9:43 PM
I do not personally work on Votive so I don't know *exactly* why this particular bug hasn't been fixed before now. My guess is that Justin was just busy working on other things but if you really want to know you could ask him: http://blogs.msdn.com/jrock.
Comment by Mike on Sunday, February 03, 2008 11:37 AM
On a similar topic, I’d urge you to change the development status of the SourceForge project page from ‘4 - Beta’ to ‘5 - Production/Stable’. You’ve said yourself that WiX V2 provides a stable release. I think having the project labelled as ‘Beta’ sends the wrong message to new and potential users of WiX.
I tried posting this message some time ago but got a confusing message about whether it had been received by your blogging software or not. My apologies if you have seen this message already but have just decided that it shouldn’t be allowed passed moderation.
Comment by Mike on Sunday, February 03, 2008 12:23 PM
I think that many SourceForge WiX users will only look as far as the Downloads page to find what they think is the latest version. That’s because they are used to looking there for other SourceForge projects. They might read your statement about weekly releases but they are just as likely to overlook it. Many will also simply go for WiX v2 from 25 May 2007, purely because it is labelled as stable.
Therefore we have the strange situation where the bulk of the WiX community is using WiX v2 from last year but all of the development effort is going into WiX v3. That somehow seems a bit of a waste to me.
I suggest that WiX v2 is refreshed on the SourceForge Downloads page, at least once during 2008. That would encourage people to at least use the most recent WiX v2 release.
I also suggest that a strategy to declare WiX v3 ‘stable’ should be established in the near future. That would encourage the WiX community to make use of all of the good work that the WiX v3 developers are doing, sooner rather than later.
Comment by Mike on Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:31 AM
If it helps, I personally try to use WiX v3 unless it exhibits a show-stopping bug (which it hasn’t for me so far). I’m happy to take each WiX v3 release and verify that it works for me, before using it. I’m happy to do that with the frequency of releases appearing on the SourceForge Download page, but not with the frequency of weekly releases. For anybody else like me who adopts a similar approach, we’d benefit from a refresh of WiX v3 to the SourceForge Downloads page, at least once during 2008.
Comment by Gabriel Lozano-Moran on Sunday, April 06, 2008 8:38 PM
Comment by Rob Mensching on Monday, April 07, 2008 5:59 PM