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Coming soon: WiX v3.9 release candidate

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In discussions on the wix-devs mailing list and during recent WiX online meetings, the consensus was that we should ship WiX v3.9 this summer to give WiX v3.10 as much time as possible for platform support for the next versions of Windows and Visual Studio.

The deadline for all features and fixes for known bugs is Friday, 6-June-2014. No new features will be considered after that date. Bug fixes will be considered after that date, of course, but only if the triage team – me, Rob, and anyone showing up for the online meetings – agrees they’re must-fix for WiX v3.9.

A release candidate build of WiX v3.9 will be available the week of 9-June. The release build of WiX v3.9 will be available sometime in July.

WiX v3.10 and beyond

We also decided to start ramping down on the work that goes into the WiX v3.x series. WiX v4.0 is ramping up and we need to ensure that work done in v3.x also gets into v4.0. As v3.x and v4.0 diverge, that’s getting more and more difficult. So here are two guidelines we’ll be putting into place in v3.x work:

  1. The breadth of new features in WiX v3.10 will be reduced in scope. In WiX v3.8 and v3.9, we allowed most every feature request that came with a well-coded pull request. But we regularly ran into backward-compatibility issues, especially in Burn changes, where most of the features came from. There was some very clever language-lawyering of what “backward compatibility” meant. 🙂 In WiX v3.10, that won’t be necessary: If there’s a question of backward compatibility, it’s a sign that the feature should go into WiX v4.0 only. In WiX v3.11 or later, we’ll consider whether any new features should go in. It might be that those releases allow only bug fixes.
  2. Features and bug fixes are made first in the wix4 repo and then back-ported to the wix3 repo. This bit of process ensures that WiX v4.0 is a proper superset of all the new features and bug fixes that are added to WiX v3.x. It also helps highlight the scope of a change – if it’s hard to back-port, it might just be because it’s too big a change for WiX v3.x.

There are plenty of bugs and features still marked for WiX v3.x. These changes in policy don’t mean we don’t want those bugs and features, just that as we approach WiX v4.0 becoming a production-ready toolset, we need to be aware of how much we divide our attention. As long as we have contributors willing to work on WiX v3.x, we’ll keep going.