I've run into some trouble with patching one of our products and I believe that the problem is that our patch is now too large (~2.4GB), however, using MSIDIFF, I have noticed that almost all of the binaries that ship with our project would end up in the patch, even though most of them have not changed.
I have two questions related to patching that I hope someone can answer for me.
For each release, the version number is changed for all of our binaries, whether they have changes or not. For example, if the file foo.exe is released at version 1.0.0, in the next release it will be re-versioned to 1.0.1 even if there are no changes. Is it safe to assume that a.) This is a bad practice for several obvious reasons, and b.) This is causing all of our files to end up in our patches?
We employ a yearly release cycle with a full release early in the year and all subsequent releases are patches for up to 12 months. For the product effected by this patch issue, we had a massive change that was required, so for the 1.0.5 release, we provided a full installer which has also become the base for future patches. Now, we are releasing patch 1.0.6, and it's gigantic. My assumption is that since we did not change the major or minor version, the patch does not start patching from the base full release of 1.0.5 that we just made, it takes into account all changes since the original 1.0.0 release. Is that correct?
1. If the file version (which is embedded in the binary) differs, then the file *is* different and needs to be patched. In your patch configuration settings, make sure that "include whole files" is set to no. This might reduce the size of the patch in this case.
2. It depends on your patch configuration. Did you select 1.0.5 as base version? Note however that in this case the patch cannot be used to update from 1.0.4. or previous versions, obviously.
