Is Heat going away?

[claybrooks]

Is Heat going to be maintained in v5 and beyond? Or are you guys moving away from Heat towards the new Files feature introduced in v5, with a plan to deprecate Heat at some point in the future?

[robmen]

Heat is going away. Probably in v7 or v8.

[barnson]

How are you running Heat that it's "explicit opt-in"?

[claybrooks]

We run Heat outside of the build process and maintain by "hand". Essentially we have scripts that we run periodically and we perform code reviews before we accept merging in.

It's explicit opt-in because each file must be listed explicitly in wix source files for it to be included in the package.

[barnson]

That was the original design of Heat but isn't how most people use it. Files replaces the Heat-in-the-build case. There is no current replacement for the generate-then-maintain case but naked File and the Directory and Subdirectory attributes would make it straightforward to do so and make for much better-looking authoring than Heat produced.

[claybrooks]

Thank you for the better terminology.

I definitely think there is a use case for heat-in-the-build, obviously, otherwise you guys wouldn't have done it. I can see it for hobby/small projects and projects that can tolerate rebuilding packages without too much headache.

Generate-and-maintain is more cost effective for highly regulated environments. The cost of building a generate-and-maintain system once is cheap compared to the cost of delivering broken installer packages every now and again. Weeks/months of paperwork when our delivery is broken just isn't worth the sleekness and ease of Files.

Of all the wonderful things that Wix makes easy for developers, acting as a gating mechanism to validate your build outputs is high on the list, for me at least.

If Heat goes away in v7/v8 with no intent to replace, my guess is something 3rd party will take its place shortly.

[barnson]

You're preaching to the choir but Heat is a mess and for years, nobody's volunteered to maintain it.