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Keeping MSI date/time stamps constant


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kthardin

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Posted 28 February 2005 - 20:20

My company, at present, time is using a product called Radia that was originally owned by Novadigm, but is now owned by Hewlet Packard. Before it was sold, Novadigm aquired a company called WALLS, an MSI creation tool, and incorporated it into their product. That they're using Radia is not something I can control, so I'm stuck with this product which works...most of the time.

Now that I have that out of the way and hopefull don't get the, "Switch Products," response, here's the problem:

When Radia deploys an MSI it attaches a date/time stamp to all files that is actually the date and time the application was deployed down, rather than what they actually are. The work around is attaching a /T (capital T there) to the deployment command line which goes and verifies every single file and resets their date/time back to what it was originally. This is a bit of a resource hit on larger applications.

My question is, does anyone know of any way to allow the MSI itself to verify the date/time on certain files and keep them the same? Note these files are database files, which are then updateable by outside applications, and cannot be 'healed' by the MSI's self repair feature either.

Stefan Krueger

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Posted 02 March 2005 - 16:20

The File table in the .msi file only stores size, version and language of a file, but no date or time information.

kthardin

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Posted 03 March 2005 - 23:52

QUOTE (Stefan Krueger @ 2005-03-02 16:20)
The File table in the .msi file only stores size, version and language of a file, but no date or time information.

Yes, this I know. However, this still does not answer the original question asked, which was essentially, how to tell the MSI not to modify the date/time stamp when it is deployed via the Radia Product. It may not keep the information, but it certainly has no problems modifying this information; which as I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, is encoded within the files themselves. How do I tell the MSI NOT to do this?

Stefan Krueger

Stefan Krueger

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Posted 04 March 2005 - 14:50

MSI itself will not change the file date (that is: the modified date. We are not talking about create or access date here, right?), it looks like Radia does this. Since MSI doesn't store the original date it cannot set the date back to the original. You would have to prevent Radia from changing the file date. I don't know Radia, so unless someone else knows an answer you would have to ask HP.

kthardin

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Posted 06 March 2005 - 06:15

Unfortunately, I don't see how this could possibly be the case. Radia acts as little more than an HTTP server that tells the MSI to deploy files to the desktop. The actual distribution of files is handled by the MSI; therefore unless the coders of Radia were complete and total geniuses and imbeciles (which is possible), Radia is wasting its resources to go back and reset all the files it knows nothing about to the current date/time stamp it was deployed.

Radia is not what's doing this...at least not on its own. It is certainly the method of deployment to the desktop that's doing this, but this functionality must also be present in the MSI for it to work. Meaning the MSI has got to be capable of changing the date/time stamp for Radia to be able to tell it to do so. So the question is, where is this functionality and how can I change it so it DOESN'T do this when Radia tells the MSI to deploy the files to the desktop?

As I said before, in Radia there IS a switch I can place in the deployment dialog in order to stop this from occuring, but it becomes resource intensive for Radia itself, but it's still just passing commands to the MSI itself...for these commands to work the MSI must be capable of performing them. You see what I'm trying to ask?

Stefan Krueger

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Posted 09 March 2005 - 14:33

I see what you're asking, but I'm not aware of such a switch or command that Radia could pass to MSI. But you could generate a verbose log file (enable the logging policy) to see what command line parameters Windows Installer receives.
How do you package the files? In CABs? Or uncompressed application files on a network share? In this case maybe the file date gets chaged when stuffing them into the CABs or when copying them to the network share (or from the network share to the user's machine) which could be a network driver issue.