Troubles with existing files

[fabien]

Hello folks. I have been running into a rather odd behaviour with Visual Patch. I have two versions of my software, release 1 and 2 let's say. I create an update file using visual patch. I run this update against a set of release 1 files. The update runs successfully. It adds files that we added to release 2 (did not exist in release 1). So far so good. Existing files however (same name, different content, different CRC value) are skipped!!! I am a long time CVS user and would expect Visual Patch to understand that a file has changed (same name, same directory) and to consequently overwrite this file. Am I missing something?

[Mark]

Hi,

If you look at the files that are not being overwritten in Visual Patch do they have different CRC values on each tab? Visual Patch is designed to automatically replace files that exist in two different versions as long as their CRC values are different.

I'm not sure what the problem is so I need a bit more information from you.

First off have you added all of the files included in release 1 onto one version tab, and then added all of the files included in release two to a second version tab? Are the CRC values of the files from release 1 that you test with different from the CRC values in your Visual Patch project?

Hopefully your answers will help us solve your problem.

[fabien]

Mark, I believe I have found the cause of the problem. Visual Patch calculates the CRC value at the time the file is added to the project. If this file changes, its CRC is not modified. The CRC values in both release versions were different from each other (and different from the actual file system value) so I would have expected Patch to include the files in question instead of skipping them. It appears that there *could* be an inconsistency in the implementation of this behaviour? My short term problem is resolved however. Thanks for your feedback.

[Mark]

Hi,

I'm glad to see that your problem was solved.

Basically Visual Patch "Recognizes" files using their CRC Values. If it encounters a file with the same name and a different CRC value then Visual Patch knows it is a different file.

In effect "Readme.txt" and "Readme.txt" are two different files if their CRC values are different.