ADR 0011 — Pre-Extracted MSIs, Not the InstallShield Self-Extractor

symeval-7.3.2.0.exe is not an InstallAnywhere installer like its Linux counterpart — it is an InstallShield self-extracting bundle of native MSI packages. InstallAnywhere flags fall silently through to the full interactive GUI wizard, which then hangs forever waiting for input in an unattended pipeline (strings -n 6 on the binary found zero InstallAnywhere markers, only InstallShield.Setup).

symeval --extract <dir> is itself a real, non-headless 3-click InstallShield wizard (Welcome→Next, License→Accept, Complete→Finish) — confirmed only by live VNC screenshot, not by any log or exit code.

A previously undocumented Windows "Networks" shell flyout ("allow your PC to be discoverable") can sit on top of the License Agreement dialog and silently block headless BM_CLICK button automation — it is a titleless XAML ShellExperienceHost surface that EnumWindows/GetWindowText cannot see as a normal window, and NetworkLocation=Work in the unattend file does not suppress it.

Three successive automation watchdogs (fixed timeout, disk-growth heuristic, process-tree CPU heuristic) each falsely diagnosed these stalls as a slow/stuck extract and killed genuinely-fine-but-waiting-on-a-dialog runs, before a single screenshot settled the question in one look. The project recorded the general lesson: "when a guard has killed more healthy runs than it caught real failures, the guard is the bug."

Once extraction was forced through once, the real installed artifact names turned out to be egocore-4.0.0.0.msi and soamcore-7.3.2.0.msi — not egocore-7.3.2.0.msi as every script and doc had assumed. egocore is versioned against the EGO base release (ego_base 4.0 in the eval entitlement), not the Symphony product version; soamcore does track the product version as expected. Getting this wrong would 404 against a served path built from the wrong assumption.

Removes an entire class of non-determinism (InstallShield GUI automation, the invisible Networks flyout, watchdog false-positives) from the automated pipeline — stage 2 now runs deterministic, silent MSI installs with real, checkable exit codes.

The one-time extract is done once per Symphony version, not once per pipeline run — the ~10-failed-attempt cost was paid once, not on every image build.

Matches the general project lesson that fragile guards against a misunderstood failure mode should be replaced by fixing the actual failure mode, not tuned further.

Introduces a manual, human-in-the-loop step (the one-time MSI extract, with VNC clicks) per Symphony version upgrade — this is not part of the automated pipeline and must be re-run and re-published deliberately whenever IBM ships a new symeval/production installer build.

installer-repo must now serve MSIs over WebDAV in addition to whatever it already served — a new artifact type and endpoint to keep in sync with the version actually installed.

The extracted MSI filenames are not self-evidently correlated with the Symphony product version (egocore tracks the EGO base version, soamcore tracks the product version) — this mismatch must be re-verified, not assumed, on every future extract (e.g. via msitools), or the same wrong-filename class of bug recurs.