Re: [GD-General] Multifile atomic updates

[Jason M. <jma...@li...>]

You would probably want to have a way to recognize that something bad
happened that stopped the update from completing.  I'm not sure what you
mean by the brute force mechanism, but the first thing that comes to my mind
is to create a temporary file, say "patching.txt", that would be created
before the patch begins and deleted when it is finished.  The game and/or
patch installer could check for the existence of this file when it starts
up, and if it's there you would know something funky happened while updating
and the update needs to be redone (or better yet continued from where it got
interrupted).

-Jason

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hook" <bri...@py...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 9:32 PM
Subject: [GD-General] Multifile atomic updates


Say you have a patch installer that needs to update the following
files:

GAME.EXE
GAME.DLL
NETAPI.DLL

The typical way would be to download the patch, apply it to temporary
files, then copy over the files upon completion.

PATCH GAME.EXE NEWGAME.EXE
PATCH GAME.DLL NEWGAME.DLL
PATCH NETAPI.DLL NEWNETAPI.DLL

//Assume UPDATE renames existing to .EXT.OLD
//and copies NEW*.EXT to *.EXT
UPDATE GAME.EXE
UPDATE GAME.DLL
UPDATE NETAPI.DLL

Obviously nothing destructive happens until after the patches are
applied and you can verify that everything is okay.  But what do you
do if something bad happens during the destructive update portion,
e.g. lost connection to remote disk or power outage or system crash,
etc. during the update?

The brute force mechanism seems a little, well, brute force, I was
wondering if there's something more elegant I could do.

Brian




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