Hi Andre; This initiative is hugely important. Thanks for working on it.
> From: Andre Fischer ... > >Hi, > >In the last days I looked into how to create installation patches for updating >AOO. Using patches instead of full installation packages would lead to >smaller files to distribute for updating AOO on the next release. > >I have created a new Wiki page for my findings. Please see [1] for an >overview and the details of how to create patch files. Note that I have >concentrated on the Windows platform for the time being. > >My results for the impatient: > >1. I have written a Perl script with which I have created a Windows Installer >MSP patch file that updates an installed Apache OpenOffice 3.4 to 3.4.1. Its >size is roughly a tenth of the full installation package. There are some >minor problems, like the about box still displaying 3.4 as current version in >the first line. The second line is OK. > >2. There is already some support for the creation of patch files in the >make_installer.pl script but this functionality is inactive. It is not >triggered by the makefile in module instsetoo_native/ and therefore I can not >say whether it would still work. > > >[1] http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Building_installation_packages > > >Best regards, >Andre > > By far the Windows case is most important. I will add here some notes on how it's done on FreeBSD (and optionally linux). Normal installation files: For FreeBSD we don't use either .rpm or .deb format: we have epm generate general archive files. These are later untarred and the ports system takes care of re-tarring into our native pkg format (actually just a tar file with package listing). As you can imagine generating packages takes a lot of time: it involves extracting and repackaging.: it would be nice to have a "raw" mode that just installs things and let our ports/packaging system take over. Updates: FreeBSD will be transitioning RSN to the new pkgng format which takes care of dependencies and updates in third party packages. I haven't looked at it in detail but it is considered ready for prime time and has been tested extensively. For the base system we have a system in place which uses bsdiff: http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/ This would be very useful to release binary patches for security fixes or minor updates. Google chrome used this same mechanism and later enhanced it into Courgette: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette hth, Pedro.
