Melt.exe wixpdb "rebase" and NOT extract binaries from msi

[wixbot]

Melting all of our "RTM" products takes about 35 minutes to complete. What I have found is that if I zip up this collection of goodies and stick it on the network share ONCE, I can copy it down and I was trying to re-use that melted output (out folder + out pdb) for the pyro step.
But pyro complains that it cannot find the binaries in a path in the wixpdb.

The issue here really is that I'm running Jenkins in a cluster, and each node has a workspace root with a randomized piece, thanks to the perforce plugin. Not only that, some of the "working" drives have different drive letters, further complicating the issue. This last point could be fixed by homogenizing the cluster but that's a lot of work.

For now, I'm simply melting the RTM installers every time, but this seems to be a massive waste of disk && CPU I/O. My unzipping step for all of our installers takes about 11 minutes. So the unzip process is MUCH faster.

My feature request at the end of the day is this:

Can melt simply "rebase" the wixpdb if I were to point it to an already existing melt output directory? I basically don't want to have melt re-output everything to the -x argument again. Nothing on the help syntax for 3.7 indicates a way of doing this.

I have tried omitting the -x argument but it still takes 35 minutes to do the work.

Originally opened by scubasteve

[wixbot]

Fork created:
https://wix.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/forks/stunney/feature4239

Originally posted by scubasteve

[wixbot]

Either make melt use relative paths or add a switch to allow skipping the extraction portion.

Originally posted by barnson

[wixbot]

I am thinking the latter option is a) fastest TTC and b) safest.

Originally posted by scubasteve

[wixbot]

wixtoolset/wix3#7

Originally posted by barnson
Resolution set to implemented
Status changed from Open to Resolved