My company sells two products that are essentially the same(From an install point of view) other than a 0 or 1 placed in the database. They would like for the customers to not be completely aware of this though(For obvious reasons) and therefore want to release two seperate installations.
Obviously I want them to be the same installation, and I'd really like to be able to make a patch that applies to either. I was considering making two releases with a release flag that will set a property to determine the few minor changes.
My biggest worry is that this may affect future patches or upgrades. Is there any issue with this? Is there a better way to do this design wise? My other idea was to include an ini file of some sort with a switch for setting the product.
I think the biggest worry with this approach is that every minor upgrade, patch, and major upgrade you make down the road will have to be built both ways. You'll have the bulk of your logic just once, and this isn't a lot of overhead, but it certainly increases the chance of making a mistake.
Just to toss out one other approach, but one that is possibly easier to reverse engineer, would be to create your base builds and apply a transform when installing it as the higher SKU. This way the same transform could be used and you'd only have one build of each upgrade. Again, either of these methods can probably be reverse engineered given access to both packages (and base+transform counts as both).
