The suite stage_only option does not uncompress all packages. It seems to depend on the state of packages on the system where I run the command line. So if I am an administrator, I cannot uncompress packages like .NET 4.0 if my current system already has .NET 4.0 already installed. Also packages like 'Windows Installer 4.5" do not extract because on most systems it will already exist, however, there may be one or two within a domain that do not have this update and our MSI requires it.
For .NET framework this is not as big of a deal as I can document the limitation. But let's say an administrator uses a local computer where our app is already installed, many of our third party package such as Crystal Reports, Easy HL7 Reports, etc, will not be included in the files to be extracted.
Now the problem I am attempting to solve is documenting the process of deploying prerequisites on a system without SCCM or equivalent software, but does have active directory. With active directory we can only create a gpo with msi packages. Somehow I have to enable our customers to deploy all of the prerequisites. I was hoping to do this using a startup script.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Is there a better way to manage this? What are the advantages of deploying the MSI for our product using a gpo rather than a startup script?
Is there any solution to the problem I am seeing with /stage_only? Note that my expectation is that stage only should extract all packages to the ISRootStagePath and not check eligibility requirements.
Hmm. This sounds like an oversight. I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to run my own tests, so it would be good to report this through your support contract. But as a potential workaround, could you add Property Comparison conditions to your Detection and/or Eligibility conditions (i.e. override detection/eligibility when ISRootStagePath is set)? This workaround might not work so well with .msi packages, but should be easy to integrate with the average .exe package's conditions.
Thank you Michael. I will look into this alternative. I also think I might be able to implement a condition for if mode is stage only.
EDIT: Just took a look at the suite options and a condition for mode does not exist for packages; however, as you suggested property comparison does exist.
I just did a test on Windows 7 and adding a condition to the Eligibility conditions is sufficient it seems, especially for conditions that are OS related. For instance, the package for installing Windows Installer for Windows Server 2003 would not 'stage' using /stage_only. However, adding a 'Property Comparison' to 'Eligibility Condition' fixes the problem. My condition I added was ISRootStagePath, String, GreaterThan, "" allows for the package to be uncompressed during /stage_only. It does not run if installing on Windows 7 because all of the conditions under "Any" are false. It should install for Windows 2003 because the OS condition will be true.
So it looks as if I only have to modify eligibility and not detection in this case.
