FinalBuilder and WiX 3.11 command line

FinalBuilder Bugs
1

I just upgraded to FB8 from FB6 and I recently upgraded WiX from 3.10 to 3.11.

The FB plug-in for WiX adds the -pedantic option to every invocation of candle.exe, with a choice of easy, heroic and legendary as a modifier.

It appears that as of WiX 3.11 the -pedantic option no longer supports the modifier; passing a command line with -pedantic:easy produces a very unhelpful error message from candle “The given path’s format is not supported”.

Unfortunately, there’s no option in the FB action for WiX to leave out the -pedantic option entirely or omit the modifier.

2

Do you have a reference to the change? I’m struggling to find any doco on the command line arguments at all… seems like the wix doco has gone backwards over time (or my memory is playing tricks).

3

Looking at our code

 var wixVersion = GetWiXVersion();

   // Pedantry
   if (wixVersion == 2)
   {
    if (props.PropertyAsBoolean("pedantEasy"))
    {
     CommandLine.AddArgument("-pedantic:easy","",qtNone);
    }
    else if (props.PropertyAsBoolean("pedantHeroic"))
    {
     CommandLine.AddArgument("-pedantic:heroic","",qtNone);
    }
    else
    {
     CommandLine.AddArgument("-pedantic:legendary","",qtNone);
    }
   }
   else if ((wixVersion == 3) && props.PropertyAsBoolean("showPedanticMessages"))
   {
    CommandLine.AddArgument("-pedantic", "", qtNone);
   }

This would suggest to me that the Wix version in the options is set to version 2.x.

4

Agreed! The command line documentation is awful - I remember it being a lot better than that. I couldn’t find any documentation on the candle command line, but looking at the source code on Github, it’s plain that -pedantic does not support the modifier. It ends up falling into the case of trying to parse -pedantic:easy as a file name, thus producing the terrible error message.

Ah ha! WiX was set as Wix 2 in my FB options. All better now. Thanks!