Log of actions taken?

[deadbug]

I'm using WPI 4.3.8 in my UA CD and mostly things work. Those few things that do not work are problems with program installs (or with my scripts) rather than issues with WPI.

But I have found that sometimes things do not get installed, for no apparent reason.

One example is Adobe Photoshop.

My script has perhaps 100 apps and so forth that could get installed. If I cut things down to a dozen or so then Photoshop does get installed and all is well.

If I go back up to 100+ apps Photoshop is not installed (no sign of it in Program Files etc.).

I'm looking for some option that will cause WPI to write a log file somewhere to say that it is trying to install prog[N].

I can do this by adding a cmd[pn] to each entry, but before I do that I thought I would check to make sure that I'm not missing something obvious!

[Kelsenellenelvian]

The "Show source" option is basically what you are looking for it will tell you what WPI is doing and plans on doing when you press begin...

Edited April 13, 2006 by kelsenellenelvian

[deadbug]

The "Show source" option is basically what you are looking for it will tell you what WPI is doing and plans on doing when you press begin...

I've been playing with a Multiboot for a while so I've not had the chance to look any further into this until now.

"Show Source" does tell me what WPI will do, but what I really want is a log of what actually happened and, perhaps more usefully for my problem, the time at which each command was issued.

I cannot see anything that does this, or even generates any sort of log, which would be a good starting point for some hacking.

Am I missing something or should I ask in the hope of an enhancement in the next release or should I just go and hack and see what I can come up with?

Thanks.

[mritter]

I have a note about it in my "To Do List". Don't hold your breath, but maybe in v5.1.

[moonglow]

Hi,

you wrote it only occures if you are installing a lot of apps, maybe you should check if another app has the same sequence number, then only one of your apps with this number will be installed (made this mistake myself some time ago). What version of Photoshop do you try to install, CS2? Then you could e.g. pass commandline option (/l*v "C:\tmp\cs.log") to the MSI (not the setup.exe), that will show you information about the install process for CS2 (sure only if it's started ).

I've some apps, that behave a bit whimpsy depending on the installation order, cause maybe one app installed beforehand would like a reeboot I suppressed (e.g. WSFTP), so I changed the order in which those apps get installed.

HTH

[deadbug]

Hi,

you wrote it only occures if you are installing a lot of apps, maybe you should check if another app has the same sequence number, then only one of your apps with this number will be installed (made this mistake myself some time ago). What version of Photoshop do you try to install, CS2? Then you could e.g. pass commandline option (/l*v "C:\tmp\cs.log") to the MSI (not the setup.exe), that will show you information about the install process for CS2 (sure only if it's started ).

I've some apps, that behave a bit whimpsy depending on the installation order, cause maybe one app installed beforehand would like a reeboot I suppressed (e.g. WSFTP), so I changed the order in which those apps get installed.

HTH

I though duplicate sequence numbers were OK and that only the uid had to be unique?

I'm doing this with Photoshop7 (I know it's old, but I bet it's smaller than CS2 :-)).

I am invoking setup.exe but I can always write a timestamp to a log file on %systemdrive% before and after invoking setup.exe. I was just looking for some way of having that done automatically so I could look for "problems". I've read somewhere that multiple simultaneous MSI installations is bad, so if some of the installations just fire off a new task to do the real work, WPI will be none the wiser and just move on to the next one. A log would help me spot this sort of thing.

[moonglow]

I though duplicate sequence numbers were OK and that only the uid had to be unique?

AFAIK your apps get installed following the sequenz number and if there are two or more apps with the same number only one of them gets installed.

I'm doing this with Photoshop7 (I know it's old, but I bet it's smaller than CS2 :-)).

Thats for sure :-) I only posted my suggestion for CS2 cause I recently had to create a silent install for it, and I needed the logs to find out why my install did not alway work (part of it was about spawning some other msi installs and the master msi closed while the childs were still running)

I am invoking setup.exe but I can always write a timestamp to a log file on %systemdrive% before and after invoking setup.exe. I was just looking for some way of having that done automatically so I could look for "problems".

ok, thats beyond my scope, thats the domain of kel or mritter I think ;-)

[mritter]

In the WishList for v5.0 thread I said I will add a log feature. It shouldn't be hard at all to integrate. Check out that thread for more details.