Sitecore 7.5 and Installing Packages through handler is broken

I was upgrading a 7.2 to 7.5 today and I noticed something unexpected that I wanted to share today.

As maybe a few of you, I am using TDS to generate my update packages for my deployments. This is awesome and We have a .ashx on our QA environment that automatically install those packages and publish items afterwards. Well, this was quite nice and working fine on Sitecore 7.2.

However, after upgrading the site to 7.5 I noticed that the solution was not compiling against the new Sitecore DLL.. And the reason was: SaveInstallationMessages() method was removed from the UpdateHelper on the Sitecore 7.5. So the following line was failing:

                    UpdateHelper.SaveInstallationMessages(entries, text);

If you compare the previous version of the Install() method from Sitecore.Update.InstallUpdatePackage

protected string Install()
{
 string result;
 using (new ShutdownGuard())
 {
  this.logEntries = new List();
  PackageInstallationInfo installationInfo = this.GetInstallationInfo();
  string text = null;
  List entries = null;
  try
  {
   this.WriteMessage(string.Format("{0} package: {1}", (installationInfo.Action == UpgradeAction.Preview) ? "Analyzing" : "Installing", installationInfo.Path), null, Level.INFO, false);
   entries = UpdateHelper.Install(installationInfo, this, out text);
  }
  catch (PostStepInstallerException ex)
  {
   entries = ex.Entries;
   text = ex.HistoryPath;
   throw ex;
  }
  finally
  {
   UpdateHelper.SaveInstallationMessages(entries, text);
  }
  result = text;
 }
 return result;
}

With the new version:

// Sitecore.Update.InstallUpdatePackage
protected string Install()
{
 string result;
 using (new ShutdownGuard())
 {
  this.logEntries = new List();
  PackageInstallationInfo installationInfo = this.GetInstallationInfo();
  string text = null;
  this.logMessages = new List();
  try
  {
   this.WriteMessage(string.Format("{0} package: {1}", (installationInfo.Action == UpgradeAction.Preview) ? "Analyzing" : "Installing", installationInfo.Path), null, Level.INFO, false);
   this.logMessages = UpdateHelper.Install(installationInfo, this, out text);
   base.InstallationHistoryRoot = text;
  }
  catch (PostStepInstallerException ex)
  {
   this.logMessages = ex.Entries;
   base.InstallationHistoryRoot = ex.HistoryPath;
   throw ex;
  }
  finally
  {
   this.SaveInstallationMessages();
  }
  result = text;
 }
 return result;
}

You can notice the SaveInstallationMessages is now defined on the control itself. This is a bit annoying as we cant re-use it in our handler anymore.
Since the UpdateHelper.Install is still outing the history path I could go around the issue by adding the SaveInstallationMessages() into our handler directly but that means duplication of methods. I would have prefered the old static method, but I could not find any other way for now...

        protected string Install(string package)
        {
            var log = LogManager.GetLogger("LogFileAppender");
            string result;
            using (new ShutdownGuard())
            {
                var installationInfo = new PackageInstallationInfo
                {
                    Action = UpgradeAction.Upgrade,
                    Mode = InstallMode.Install,
                    Path = package
                };
                string text = null;
                List entries = null;
                try
                {
                    entries = UpdateHelper.Install(installationInfo, log, out text);
                }
                catch (PostStepInstallerException ex)
                {
                    entries = ex.Entries;
                    text = ex.HistoryPath;
                    SC.Diagnostics.Log.Error("Automated Deployment error " + ex.StackTrace, "Automated deployment");
                    throw;
                }
                finally
                {
                    this.SaveInstallationMessages(entries, text);
                }

                result = text;
            }

            return result;
        }

        public string SaveInstallationMessages(System.Collections.Generic.List entries, string historyPath)
        {
            string text = System.IO.Path.Combine(historyPath, "messages.xml");
            FileUtil.EnsureFolder(text);
            using (System.IO.FileStream fileStream = System.IO.File.Create(text))
            {
                XmlEntrySerializer xmlEntrySerializer = new XmlEntrySerializer();
                xmlEntrySerializer.Serialize(entries, fileStream);
            }
            return text;
        }