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Thursday, August 19, 2010

InstallShield Stand Alone Build Error -1131

I was just reading this InstallShield KB article and it really makes me scratch my head.   Basically what it is saying is that the SAB has a dependency on the MS C++ 2005 SP1 Redist but that the SAB installer doesn't actually install it and hence an installer failure becomes a runtime/  failure.

Are you serious?  InstallShield has the best setup bootstrapper / chainer on the market.   Did no one notice they needed to add a C++ redist prereq?   Did they know but just not want to add the 2.3MB to the package?  Did they not know to use an AppSearch/LaunchCondition to gate the install?

But the part that really gets me is:

This unlikely situation is apt to appear on clean Windows/XP or Windows 2003 Server images.

Isn't the point of the SAB to enable *CLEAN* build machines?  If customers are following proper CM practices there should be alot of people with build machines that don't resemble the magical build machine antipattern.  I run my build machines lean and mean and I just looked - no C++ runtime on them.   No Visual Studio either.

3 comments:

  1. LMAO - They should be installing the msvcr8.dll et all side-by-side anyway (for the reason you already mentioned - it's for clean build environments).

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  2. I use clean XP SP3 for my build machines and do not see this issue.

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  3. Chris,

    Agree 100% that our install should detect all required dependencies for InstallShield or Standalone Build and if not present install them. After all that is the definition of a robust install.

    With that said, it was a late find in our QA cycle and since the issue was not consistently reproducible we suggested a work around in the KB. Also to clarify we only saw the issue on Windows XP.

    We will definitely address it after we get to the bottom of it.

    Thanks,
    Chirag
    Flexera Software

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