[lokisetup] snapshot/release question

[Stéphane Peter]

Le sam 01/02/2003 à 13:55, John Quigley a écrit :
> I ran into an issue with loki_update compatibility, just wanted to get 
> people's thoughts on it...
> 
> I just finished work on the marble blast installer.   
> (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=3)  I used the cvs 
> versions of setup and setupdb for this.  However, when I ran an older version 
> of loki update on an installed marble blast, it said this:
> 
> Searching for installed products... Warning: This XML file was generated with 
> a later version of setupdb (1.6).
> Problems may occur.
> done!

Well the setupdb database includes version information (always as), so
that any change in its format may be reflected (for obvious reasons).

In practice, there have been very few changes to the XML format and most
of the time this warning can be just discarded.
 
> This scared me a bit, so I made the (perhaps unwise) decision to rename the 
> loki prefix for my setup programs to ".gglokisetup" instead of ".loki" so 
> that those old updaters wouldn't mess with my new files.  This worked, but 
> unfortunately it put me in to my own little loki update world (i.e., users 
> with Marble blast installed can only update it with my version of loki 
> update, not the one that other games use.).

Well that's a perfectly valid solution. IMHO, it is not necessarily a
good thing for all games out there to use the default ".loki" prefix. It
is easily changeable  via a configure option for setupdb, so you might
as well use a different prefix if you are not affiliated with Loki :)

On the other hand, it should be noted that at least the uninstall
program tries to update itself upon each installation. There is always a
cached binary in the user's ~/.loki/installed/bin directory. I guess a
similar mechanism could be introduced for loki_update, so that
installing a newer product could trigger an automatic update of the
update binary...

> I've got two more games in the pipeline and am considering going to back to 
> ".loki" for them, so that life is easier for users.  Just wondering if anyone 
> has run into problems with old tools using the new files.
> 
> PS: Thanks for writing these tools.  The install process is quite smooth, and 
> it would have been complete suckage without them.

Thanks :)

-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.