Hi all,
This is somewhat of a rant topic, but there are also clearly some issues with the installer and it has made everything more difficult to properly distribute the deployments to our customers' machines. I want to at least leave some feedback, because I see the same issues that are in '22 return in '23 and '24 and I figured, if no one has found out those issues by now, someone should probably mention something.
I'm a senior packager, been doing this for 15 years. I have repackaged many Autodesk applications and the issues we experience have gotten progressively worse, the more automation Autodesk builds into their installers. I am posting this on one of my corporate client accounts.
Let's start with a few potential rebuttals:
- All machines we use for our activities are 'clean' W10 machines.
- The clean machines have a baseline customer configuration, so each customer provides their own machines and we share issues across all of them.
Hence, the issue does not seem to be with the platforms themselves.
1. Let's start with the first, most significant issue with the installer. It always returns error code 0.
Occasionally, a forced windows security update interferes with the Autodesk installation and one component fails installation. The installation then return to the user, that components have not been installed and the user should contact their administrators, however, it reports error code 0 upon closing the installer. This occurs across a large amount of error messages and only seems to report an accurate exit code in rare cases. We have tested this by explicitly monitoring the exit codes and the logging may show MSI Error 1603, but the installer still returns 0.
This is a significant problem and unless this is deliberate and can be manually manipulated, seems to be a major programming mistake. It leads to our systems seeing Error code 0, which results in a successful installation, while the user may have any number of missing applications or components.
2. Only with the logging tool, is it at all possible to get a coherent summary of the installation(s) that failed. We would like to use the logging tool within our applications to create a custom script to verify the actual installation status, but we cannot, because the logging tool does not seem to have parameters to run silently and to modify an output directory, etc. I'm sure one could imagine many more reasonable and useful parameters that could be given here.
3. The "silent" install never finishes installing. I have had to defer to UI installs for our customers for all products, although it mostly seems to affect multi-part installers, such as Civil3D, Revit, Map3D, etc. I am assuming it pushes a request for reboot to the user 'under the hood', but since the installation is silent, the user is never going to see it. This results in installers just endlessly waiting for input.
Edit: I forgot to mention, due to the fact that a UI installation allows the user to CANCEL the installation, its twice ironic that the installer still returns error code 0! (See (1.))
4. The (Autodesk automatically generated) uninstallers try to uninstall the Autodesk Genuine Service. So when I try to run the Uninstall command taken from the commandline-file provided by Autodesk, it will try to uninstall the Genuine Service and our users are then presented with a beautiful warning that their own IT department is trying to install malicious software on their computers. I am paraphrasing, but you catch my drift.
I have had to be creative and I've been using C:\Programdata\Autodesk\Uninstallers to get around the issue, by manually manipulating each individual bundle_data.xml file.
5. Several Autodesk applications (ab)use the %allusersprofile% for templates and it's unclear to me why this would be the case. Going forward in the future, These paths are automatically blocked by security systems, so I would recommend not using them.
I currently spend about 25 hours per deployment, to be able to properly deliver a package to the end user. Obviously if the deployment only contains AutoCAD, it's slightly faster, though we uninstall previous versions of packages through the baseline package of the new version (AutoCAD), so it's still a lot of work, but I feel many of the issues we are facing, are caused by the Autodesk installer and absolutely require fixing. I'm incredibly surprised that no one has found out about these problems over the course of several years, so internally I'm hoping I'm a complete idiot, but we have had official Autodesk partners and vendors look at our issues, without solution.
Please fix these problems with the installer and help us out.
