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Last active June 21, 2019 03:20
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PDK MSI Test Pilots
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PDK MSI Test Pilots.md

Date - 21 Jun 2019

Thankyou

Firstly, thankyou for testing this out for me!!

What is this?

The install/uninstall/upgrade process for PDK can be very slow on Windows, particularly on VMs and AntiVirus products. So as part of https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PDK-1360 we looked at how to make the MSI experience much faster. After much work we have a build of the PDK MSI which is considerably faster, with minimal changes to the installation on disk

How can you help me?

I've tried this in some VMs and my local computer but I'm looking for more realistic tests in the real world, and this is where you come in!

I'd like you to try installing (and uninstalling) this new MSI and

  1. Make sure it installs and uninstalls with no errors
  2. Installs and uninstalls faster for you
  3. Basic functions still work for you

Just a note on upgrades. The upgrade experience should be better but it will still be slow. This is because it will uninstall the old MSI first, which hasn't been optimised yet, so it takes a long time.

Can you please then message me on the Puppet Community Slack with your findings!

How can I get it?

The MSI is available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZqgPX5B5CWXJaTTKDgqJuLkmwNNa9NxX

This is my personal Google Drive, not the corporate Puppet one

This MSI contains an interim build of PDK 1.11, packaged in a new way

Disclaimers

  • Note that this does NOT represent the final PDK 1.11 build and is subject to change.
  • There is no documentation for changes in PDK 1.11
  • Please don't commit changes to your modules using this build, but feel free to try things out

Technical Bits

What's changed?

The PDK installs MANY MANY files, which inside the MSI means lots of components which means a lot of CPU, Disk is dedicated to managing those static files. But those files don't really change so what we did is move them from being managed by the MSI installation process, and are now managed by the PDK itself.

Why is the MSI much bigger in size?

Compressed files within MSI use the Cabinet compression method, which is really good. However the static files managed by PDK use GZip (tar.gz to be precise), which doesn't compress as well. Unfortunately this results in the MSI being larger in size, but containing less overall files.

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