We build our installs\releases using Install Shield. I have come to a situation where we have a patch that cannot be upgraded by a release with a higher version number, that is missing components included in the patch.
After releasing a full minor release (i.e. 7.2.0) we released a patch on a previous full minor release (i.e. 7.1.12).
The Patch 7.1.12 had files and components added that do not exist in 7.2.0. The patch is not uninstallable.
It is now impossible to upgrade 7.1.12 to 7.2.0 because of the missing components. Some customers specifically want to upgrade to 7.2.0 and not a later version (7.3.0) where the components can be added to fix the issue.
Short of uninstalling 7.1.12 and then installing 7.2.0 I couldn’t find any solution to fix.
Is there any way around this? Can we build a 7.1.13 as a bridge to somehow fix the mistake. Or use an argument when installing 7.2.0 to get around this.
I looked around the registry and I am trying to figure out if it is possible to remove the components through the registry.
I tried deleting the component entries in the registry. that didn't do it.
If I delete the product entry in the registry that works - but it must be overkill.
I also tried deleting the patch msi from C:\Windows\Installer but that didn't do it.
There must still be a way to unlink the component from the feature in the registry without deleting the entire product.
It sounds like you're trying to do a series of Minor Upgrades, with at least 7.1.12 delivered as a patch. Using minor upgrades imposes various limitations; anything that requires you to Change the Product Code must be avoided. In your case, note that adding components is allowed, but not the reverse:
The update can add a new component to a new or an existing feature.
The product code must be changed if any of the following are true for the update:
A component is removed from an existing feature.
In short, any modifications to the feature-component tree, other than the addition of new ones, is going to require changing the product code, and thus a Major Upgrade. Major upgrades perform an uninstallation behind the scenes, and thus are less restrictive about the changes they are allowed to deliver.
You have two options:
Use a major upgrade, or some other means of uninstalling the old installation before installing the new version. If possible, this is what I would recommend. Using minor upgrades often adds more difficulty than benefit (though your needs may differ).
Maintain the new components in your newer versions. Note that you do not necessarily have to maintain the resources within them:
The update can add, remove, or modify the files, registry keys, or shortcuts of components that are not shared by two or more features.
But you will have to make additional changes to account for the changes to the resources. In your case, this probably will require additions to the RemoveFile table, and may be best served by "puncture component" pattern.
Spelunking through the registry for a workaround that modifies Windows Installer's bookkeeping is a bad idea. It may work, it may appear to work, or it may not work at all. In no case is it supported.
If both versions 7.1.12 and 7.2.0 are already publicly released, you're in a rough spot. I think your best bet there is to re-release 7.2.0 with a new product code and version, e.g. a 7.2.1 major upgrade. You can advise your end users that those already at 7.2.0 don't need to install it.
Related
On the website of Debian, it's written about point releases:
They usually incorporate the security fixes released until the time of
the update and fixes for grave bugs in the current release.
If I correctly understand, that means only minor updates can occur in the packages of the current stable version, right?
In other words, I want to know if a binary who depends of a library in a specific version (libmicrohttpd.so.12 for instance) will stay compatible in the next point releases of Debian.
Yes, but it is very seldom.
In general you are right, the point releases should not change existing API and ABI.
But there could be problems on doing that: security changes would require a lot of work, and upstream will do only for the new version. In such cases the version will be dump. But this is very seldom: it would need a security bug which effect the fundamental design of a library (not just some coding error).
In any case the old version will remain on archives, and you can keep it (so that it would not be automatically removed), so that you can still use, hopefully with relevant safe guard.
Are there any plans for the ServiceStack packages to start using the SemVer standard? We just had an unfortunate circumstance where we were broken by the interface breaking changes introduced in 4.0.44 from 4.0.43 around OrmLite.
We are a sizable commercial customer and have a custom implementation of a OrmLiteDialectProvider for one of our DBMSs, it all seemed good upon the initial upgrade in our web application, however as part of testing the changes around type converting broke our system. This wasn't initially evident as part of the upgrade because our custom implementation is in a NuGet package which overrides OrmLiteDialectProvider.ConvertDbValue on version 4.0.38 which is now gone. There were no binding issues because it is only a minor version difference.
NuGet adopted SemVer back in version 1.6.
Having the SemVer standard would make it a lot easier for us to know when interface breaking changes have been made, without having to dig through the Release Notes page.
NOTE: The release also didn't indicate that the old method had been removed and upgrading would break any custom implementations.
UPDATE FROM RESPONSE
Anyway, fair enough answer. I can appreciate it would be difficult to track each package individually. In our case we wrote a custom dialect provider as we have a legacy DBMS that wasn't supported and this appeared to be the way we were supposed to add the support. We wanted to use ORMLite because we use the rest of ServiceStack and it's a fantastic product.
The new way to support the types is a great improvement and actually made our implementation easier.
We actually ran into this issue because we do always keep our ServiceStack packages inline and were upgrading the ASP portion for some fixes to the WSDL generation and this came along as part of our upgrade.
ServiceStack adopts a single rolling version for all NuGet packages which all share the same Version number. Of all ServiceStack's 60 NuGet packages it's likely there's a breaking change to at least one of the packages so semver would be useless, you should also never mix and match different versions of ServiceStack together - when you upgrade, upgrade all packages to reference the same package versions. We do aim to keep user-facing breaking changes to a minimum, by looking to deprecate old API's first, maintain parallel API versions for a while then list the new API's release notes.
IOrmLiteDialectProvider is not a user-facing interface
However IOrmLiteDialectProvider is not considered a user-facing interface since it should be extremely rare that anyone implements their own custom provider. It's also the interface for specialization for all RDBMS's and often changes with every release to support new features, internal refactoring, optimizations, etc. E.g. implementing Type Converters was a major internal refactor that required changes to IOrmLiteDialectProvider but did not affect OrmLite's external user-facing API, later releases includes optimizations requiring further changes, again this doesn't affect OrmLite's external user-facing API.
SemVer won't help here, every ServiceStack version potentially has a breaking change in some of the packages and we have no intention to complicate each release by versioning each of the individual packages differently. The issue you're having is depending on an unstable Interface that's not intended for customization. It's not treated as a user-facing API so we don't try to maintain compatibility with existing versions or publish breaking changes which happens nearly every time we add features / optimizations to OrmLite. You should instead check the commit history of
IOrmLiteDialectProvider for any changes to this interface.
I've accidentally uploaded a faulty distribution and tried to reupload it right away, but cabal replied with:
This version of the package has already been uploaded.
As a matter of policy we do not allow package tarballs to be changed after a
release (so we can guarantee stable md5sums etc). The usual recommendation is
to upload a new version, and if necessary blacklist the existing one. In
extraordinary circumstances, contact the administrators.
Okay, I've incremented the version and uploaded the correct distro, but now I am interested in blacklisting the faulty release, as suggested. However there is no notion about how to do that anywhere whatsoever. How to do that? And what do they actually imply by the term "blacklisting"?
Go to your package page on Hackage. Scroll down to Maintainers' corner and click on edit package information. Then you'll have an option to click on Preferred versions.
This page allows you to specify version ranges or deprecate individual package versions.
Deprecated versions won't be completely gone, but cabal-install will try to respect the preferences when trying to resolve dependencies.
How to manage InstallScript differential upgrades and releases.
For every version I ship, do I need to keep two releases? One for existing customers - for upgrade and one for new customers for fresh install?
Then as the product continues its life cycle, Do I need to keep all those releases so that I could create a differential upgrade?
Is that the way companies handle their releases? seems like a lot of data to keep and handle...
Are the savings (time or size) of differential upgrades worth this hassle? It sounds like it would be significantly easier to just release full the installer for both scenarios.
Whether or not you use them to create differential releases, I would suggest keeping all your previous releases around. You never know when you'll need to test the behavior of an old release, and the only real way to do that is with its original bits.
Installshield basically just moves over all of the files to the target machine's folder. Lets say you are going from version 1.0 to 3.0. Is there any real point in your case to upgrade to 2.0 before going to 3.0? Or could you really just lay down 3.0 directly? Unless you NEED an updater, then there's no point in having one.
How we handle it, is that we have two build like you said. A 'Fresh install' and 'Updater.' We need the updater though, because we have linear database migrations that need to run for each hotfix before the software can reach the newest version, so we can't just "skip" that 2.0
If we need to apply a hotfix, we create a stripped down version of the updater until the next release, where I create another Fresh install and Updater.
I am doing a concept in linux in which i want to do version rollback for an app installed in linux. Is it possible??
For eg I have an application named X with version 1.1
I get an update. It changes it to version 1.2
I note what all the packages in the app going to be modified.
Then i save them and apply the changes.
Now after sometime due to some problems I want to switch back to version 1.1
If i undo the changes and make the entire solution will the rollback be done?
The easiest and common way in Unix is to install them in separate directories,
eg "/usr/bin/MyApp.1.2.3" and "/usr/bin/MyApp.1.2.4" then create a link to the one to use "/usr/bin/Myapp".
Changing versions is then just a matter of moving the link.
You don't need to invent anything. Just keep the packages you install around. If you want to go back, uninstall the current version and install the previous package again.