I have a big problem and I hope someone could help me. We have a quite complex setup with many files. In our build process I am creating a folder structure with our files and this is the base for our setups. The structure and the setup-project-directory are zipped with every build to be able to patch the software later.
In my tests I was able to build a patch when one or two files changed. Now, after the release of a new version, we found an error that would be ideal for a hotfix. I unzipped the structure, exchanged the file and build a patch with the reference to the released web setup. The patch is the same size as a full setup now :/ ... How can I debug this? Is there a way to find out why so many changes are packed to the patch?
The setup logic must be exactly the same across all your projects (base and patch(s) projects).
For example, supposing your BASE project install the following files;
1- Install Files c:\mypath\fileA.exe to $TARGETDIR$
2- Install Files c:\mypath\fileB.dll to $TARGETDIR$
In case both files are still present with the patch you are going to release, the above statements have to be "identical" in your PATCH project as well.
The logic remains the same, I just changed 2 source files in the structure we build the setup from but I assume the zipping/unzipping process might disturb the patching process. As the whole patching with InstallAware is not really intuitive and reliable and every "try" takes 40 Minutes we tried Visual Patch and will use this for our patches and updates.