[wix-users] Having version number in filenames when apply a patch

Douglas, Keith (STATCAN) keith.douglas at canada.ca
Mon Nov 14 06:18:50 PST 2016


Hi Christin.

Your situation is almost exactly parallel to one of ours: massive numbers of jars and other Tomcat related matters on mostly disconnected machines.

What we wound up doing is slicing the product into 7 parts. This corresponds to our application proper, its resources (CSS etc.) and 5 families of jars, determined by the origin (Apache foundation, Hibernate, etc.) so that the developers are familiar with what is what. We anticipate sending 2 or 3 packages at a time, at most, this way. That way our downloads are ~20 megabytes, not ~60. The number 7 was just an artifact of what we anticipate to be a safe download size for old school modem users overnight. You can attempt to work that out for your particular situation.

To facilitate building these packages we already have a front end to WiX for developers to use. This front end for the Tomcat stuff makes of zipdiff to compare two WAR files, rules for determining which package contains what sort of file, pre-existing understanding about the file system structure in the broad sense, etc. It is expected that there will not be "big picture changes" ever. But it can handle the P-x.y.z -> P-x.y.w scenario you described quite well.

Ideally I would have worked with the developers to ensure that this "split" made sense; as it happens I got lucky despite having to go ahead independently of the product.

Finally, we also have a front end to build a bundle that does all the initial parts and Tomcat itself (with a "tweaker" to make that work well). This will only be used at initial setup by the disk imaging team, and later if we decide to "start again". We ensure that all the packages appear in programs and features for ease of understanding, and otherwise the bundle is relatively standard.




Keith Douglas

Programmer Analyst, Collection Systems Division
Statistics Canada / Government of Canada
Keith.Douglas at canada.ca / Tel : 613-854-5589

Programmeur analyste, Division des systèmes de collecte
Statistique Canada / Gouvernenment du Canada
Keith.Douglas at canada.ca / Tél :613-854-5589

-----Original Message-----
From: wix-users [mailto:wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org] On Behalf Of Christin Meienberg | HBT
Sent: November-14-16 3:13 AM
To: wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org
Subject: Re: [wix-users] Having version number in filenames when apply a patch

Hi all.


Thank you for your answers.


Unfortunately it is also not possible leave the old files. We need to remove them due to a framework we use.


I would be happy to get an example how to solve this.


Thank you very much.


Best regards,


Christin

________________________________
Von: wix-users <wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> im Auftrag von robert_yang at agilent.com <robert_yang at agilent.com>
Gesendet: Freitag, 11. November 2016 16:57:22
An: wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org
Betreff: Re: [wix-users] Having version number in filenames when apply a patch

"Is there any other possibility to install just some jar files of the software and not the whole application again? As I understood MajorUpdate means uninstall all files and install all files with a new version.

The background ist that people using laptops with  bad network connection but need to update the system. So we like to have our update packages as small as possible."

Yes, that is what a minor update is for.  If you can deal with leaving the old jar files around, then installing new ones in a patch should not be a problem.  We do something like the following :

http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/patching/wix_patching.html

Pay attention to the bottom of the page (Restrictions).  Also, if your application has a bootstrapper, then your patch .msp will most likely also need one.

-Rob

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