Second failure from the Server 2019 test. The previous fix worked - msiexec went
from exit 1639 (ERROR_INVALID_COMMAND_LINE, which is why it printed its usage
dialog) to exit 1603 (ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE), so the command line parses now and
the MSI itself is failing.
It failed in 1.1 seconds. An MSI that dies that fast has not begun installing;
it has failed a launch condition. MySQL 8.4 requires the Visual C++
redistributable and a bare Windows Server does not ship it - the same runtime
mysql.exe and mysqldump.exe import, which was visible when their DLL
dependencies were trimmed and went unnoticed.
Stage 0 now installs VC_redist.x64.exe from the bundle before touching MySQL,
skipping it when vcruntime140.dll is already present, and fails with a sentence
naming the requirement if the redistributable is absent from the bundle
altogether. vcredist\ is an optional locked payload.
msiexec also gets /l*v now. A bare 1603 names neither the failing action nor the
reason, and it is the most common MySQL install failure - diagnosing this one
took a launch-condition inference rather than a log. The MSI log lands beside
the installer's own in ProgramData, so the next failure is readable instead of
guessed at.
The bundled-database option could not actually be built. Stage 0 looks for
mysql\mysql-8.0.x-winx64.msi, and Oracle no longer publishes a standalone server
MSI for 8.0 - every 8.0.x returns 404. What remains for 8.0 is the MySQL
Installer bundle, which is an installer-manager: 'msiexec /i INSTALLDIR=' would
install THAT rather than a database, and stage 0 would then fail on a missing
mysqld.exe.
MySQL 8.0 also reached end of life in April 2026, so bundling it would have put
an unsupported database on every new site.
8.4 LTS still ships the standalone MSI (129MB, which is what the '125MB' note in
stage 0 was written against) and is supported into 2032. Defaults follow it:
install root MySQL Server 8.4, service MySQL84. The operator console still looks
for an 8.0 install path as a fallback, for sites already running one.
Also bundles mysqlclient\ - mysql.exe and mysqldump.exe with the two OpenSSL
DLLs they actually import, 20MB rather than the 51MB of debug and auth-plugin
libraries the archive ships. Stage 2 stages it onto the server, so a site whose
database is on ANOTHER host can still take the pre-upgrade backup that every
upgrade depends on. That was the gap the preflight had started warning about.
Bundle is now 221MB.
The lock records what IS in the wheelhouse, not what the application NEEDS, so
an incomplete wheelhouse was locked, blessed and shipped - and only failed on an
air-gapped server.
That is not hypothetical. Assembling the wheelhouse anywhere other than Windows
silently omits colorama, a win32-only dependency of click, because pip evaluates
environment markers against the machine doing the downloading rather than the
machine being targeted. The bundle built here was short exactly that one wheel.
Both verifiers now cross-check wheels/ against the staged requirements.txt,
ignoring markers, since a requirement guarded by sys_platform == 'win32' is
precisely the one that must be present. Names are normalised to PEP 427 wheel
form, so mysql-connector-python matches mysql_connector_python.
bundle-lock.json is the first real lock: 42 files, cp314/win_amd64 - 39 wheels,
Python 3.14.6, HttpPlatformHandler 1.2 and URL Rewrite. MySQL is absent and
optional; a site choosing the bundled-database option adds it and re-locks.
The naming gate now skips the installer's build output. It contains a staged
copy of the application plus a second SPA build under dist-subpath, which
--exclude-dir=dist does not match, so a staged bundle failed the gate on
vendored minified JS nobody in this repository wrote.
