Question

I’m working on a program that shall have an “updates” module (online). I can’t figure out how to do this. Initially i’m trying with a SVN repository. Any better idea? How is this normally done?
(I’m not asking for a concrete languague, i only want an general idea about the procces)
Thank you.

Answer 1

What we do (in an intranet environment) is roughly:

We have an application that (instead of directly starting) points to a little script that fetches the latest ‘publicized’ version from a known location using rsync.

Then the script simply bootstraps the application itself.

This way:

• Everyone always works with the same version of the software.
• New builds are easy to deploy: just copy them over to the known ‘sync’ location.
• Using rsync or similar allows you to minify overhead since it works incrementally.

We force the upgrade upon our users, but this mechanism could also be adapted for online (on-demand) updates.