Archive: Patching an NSIS installation


Patching an NSIS installation
I haven't seen a lot of information on using vpatch and nsis to create patches for installations. I'm coming from a background of using Windows Installer to create installations and patches for distribution. With Windows Installer, two installations are created (the original and the updated) then a patch program is run that creates a binary patch using the differences in the two installations.

With NSIS and vpatch it appears that the patches must be created separately for each modified file and then included in the new installation script with a vpatch call for each one. Am I correct with this? How are patches created for large programs with hundreds or thousands of files? What about patching system files that need to be registered?

I wrote something for use with Windows Installer that compared two directories and would update an installation including all modified files and folders then run the patch utility to create the binary patch between the two installations. Are there any similar scripts/applications available that automate this process for NSIS?

Thanks,

Scott


NSIS has all features to patch and register files. If you have a large number of files you may want to write an application that generates the NSIS script.