Russian getting started folder name causes windows installer build to fail

[jasonsanjose]

Details TBD @peterflynn

[peterflynn]

Yep -- apparently Wix has some sort of encoding setting that is unhappy with the Russian chars in the getting started folder name. Hopefully it's possible to make Wix just use UTF, although I'm not 100% sure since it's built on a somewhat archaic tech stack. For now, since we're up against a wall, we should just rename the folder name back to English (and then leave this open at a lower priority for a future sprint).

[pthiess]

@peterflynn I put this into sprint 19 ToInvestigate

[pthiess]

Reviewed.

[peterflynn]

Here's the best info I could find on Wix and Unicode:

"Unofficially, MSI databases do support UTF-7 and UTF-8 by specifying code pages 65000 and 65001, respectively. Encoded strings will store correctly and will be converted correctly when the W functions are called, but they may not display properly because the correct font for wide characters is not chosen." (from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/heaths/archive/2005/10/05/477577.aspx)

The display glitch hopefully isn't an issue for us since the Unicode pathname in question won't appear in the installer UI at any point.

This sounds a little scary vis a vis our (semi-hacky) dual-locale MSI setup, which uses a mechanism called "transforms":

"If one package is used to install multiple language versions of a product, the transform that is used to localize strings can also change the code page of the database." (from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa367867(v=vs.85).aspx)

However, both the En & Fr halves of our installer are currently built with codepage set to 1252 (basically vanilla Latin ANSI), so it appears as if they're already happy being set to the same code page. Hopefully we could just as easily make them both Unicode instead of both 1252.

My last concern would be how well the resulting MSI runs on Windows XP, where (IIRC) Unicode was a little shaky at first. We'd want to make sure Windows Installer (the MSI runner) doesn't refuse to try Unicode on XP or anything.

So, my suggested course of action would be:

• Locally (or on a branch) put the folder name back to Russian
• Locally alter the installer build files to use Unicode, and try building the installer
• If successful, test across a broad set of OSes -- Win XP (En), Win XP (Fr), Win XP (Ja?), Vista/7 (En), Vista/7 (Fr), Vista/7 (Ja?)

[pthiess]

@peterflynn With the investigation done and a good plan to move forward I went ahead and removed the sprint milestone for this bug. We have a number of higher priority tasks and potentially will be able to leverage release engineering resources for these type of bugs some time soon. However I keep it assigned to you for now.
Thanks :)