2 replies to this topic

[daenur]

I wonder if anyone has tried patching software like PatchFactory (http://www.agensoft.com)?
"... reduce your software update size by 90-99%", "...the patching engine is not content dependent" and finally their "patching engine performance comparison table" (at http://www.agensoft....html#comp_table) look very appealing, but what about the reliability and OS compatibility of the prepared patch package?

Thanks.

[corey]

Quote

Easy to integrate. All Windows platforms (Windows 95/98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003) are supported from the same executable file.

Looks like they answer that and I'm apt to believe them on this. Even simple free packages like Nullsoft have decent reliability on that level.

Quote

Cumulative patch building to integrate several version-to-version updates into one patch package.

Looks like you have to specify the update that's taking place but it can handle multiple updates if specified.

You realize of course that those claims are probably correct because of the simple fact that they are removing the requirement to send whole files?

corey

[DrunkenCoder]

basicly what you need to build something like that is a good hashalgorithm (md5 or prefarable sha) then you simply bin-diff the packages and record changes.

to update you begin with validating the source file via hash and you can also validate patch success by simply comparing the new hash with your excpeted value.