MSI Bundle generator should honor msbuild ``Authors`` property when setting the authors value of the resulting msi file.

• This issue is blocking
• This issue is causing unreasonable pain

For starters, let’s say for example an .NET Foundation project uses the arcade to produce Runtime and Reference msi bundles. The resulting bundles incorrectly state Authors: Microsoft Corporation instead of Authors: .NET Foundation for example (in case the user set the msbuild property named Authors to .NET Foundation (which I think some people do). However there is also 3rd parties who use the arcade to produce msi’s and while it might be ok for thinks to hardcode it to Microsoft Corporation I do not think it is a good idea to hard code it as when 3rd parties use arcade to produce said msi installers, users who do not know who actually made said bundles might incorrectly assume Microsoft made them and that they are “safe” to install.

This is why I find this an issue as well, anyone can add the arcade feeds into their nuget feeds and use the arcade packages to produce installers for their 3rd party code with ease. Due to that, it is never really a good idea to hard code this to begin with. This is both an issue of Trust for end users (as they would think that Microsoft made it and that it is free from malicious code (which might not always be the case)), as well as an issue where Microsoft incorrectly gets credit for things they did not make / fully own (as far as I am aware of).

[AraHaan]

To be fair, I have seen external requests come in before from developers wanting to leverage parts of Arcade. While Arcade is open, I’m not sure that its original goal was to create a generic build system. There are many parts of Arcade that integrated with non-open software like Visual Studio. and would be of little value to external developers for now.

That also depends on what those external developers are making as well. Some people want to make their own .NET Runtimes (and crossgen2 specific things to make them faster) and possibly Integrate them into Visual Studio with an separate integration package.

As such even those developers would get upset if arcade stamps their packages with Microsoft Corporation instead of <insert company name here> that made the packages (I mean who would not be upset about that one).

Another example I would use would also be Paint.NET knowing that (assuming rick wanted to reduce the need to force the program to be SCD and do this to make it FDD):

• it contains a public API to use for making plugins.
• the public APIs contain some low level native bits for it’s implementation (and the person wants to ship the main application as AnyCPU but not sacrifice startup times by splitting much of the things it does into it’s own public apis and runtime packages specially optimized per cpu and so that way the apphost would just do the right thing and load the right one).
• it gets updated every so often.
• possible for plugins to have a copy of an old version of those public API binaries in their own folders (and possibly get loaded into a state that brings down the program aka dll hell).
• other reasons not yet listed.

All of those would generally be solved with shipping those public apis as a runtime msi package (that can be installed in their DOTNET_ROOT and is crossgen2’d). This would solve this because now then none of the public api binaries would get copied on build unless they publish the plugins as self contained).

[AraHaan]

yes, I even commented on the PR.