Identifying files for a hot fix/patch

Question

We (occasionally!) have to issue hot fixes for our product and do this by reissuing the affected files directly rather than with a new installer. The product has a large number of pieces, some managed code, some unmanaged.

Currently development flags which build artifacts (exes, dlls) need to be shipped in a hot fix. We'd like to be able to identify these automatically by comparing them to the previous build. A simple binary diff doesn't work since the version numbers on all the files have changed as stamping the files with a new number if part of the build.

Are there any tools that will do a more intelligent comparison and decide which files should be included? We'd still have a developer check the list, this is more to catch files the developer didn't think of than the other way around.

(Note: changing the hot fix/build process is not an immediate option, whether or not we should be shipping individual files is a different discussion!)

Answer 1

These are the options I see:

• On your build machine get a report of the files that were changed and use the directory structure of the file path to determine which dlls were really updated. Not sure if this breaks your "no build process changes" rule or not.

• If you want to wait until after the build I would recommend using a binary file diff tool like http://www.romeotango.com/Downloads/FileCompReadMe.txt. Using that you can get back a set of diffs so you just need to get your script that uses the tool to ignore the diff that occurs as a result of the version number. You can figure out the pattern to how the version number appears by using a controlled scenario where you know the two binary files are the same except for the version number and note where the differences are. Do that for a few of your dlls and hopefully a pattern emerges enough so that you can script it.