Re: Windows - have program replace itself

One other route you can take is to use PAR it enables you among other things to use and incluse large portions of your code from web servers or ftp servers. I think it can be setup to cache the includes locally and just update on change as well. It may be worth a look for you. From the relevent parts of the docs:

On-demand library fetching

With LWP installed, your can use remote PAR files:
 use PAR;
 use lib 'http://aut.dyndns.org/par/DBI-latest.par';
 use DBI;    # always up to date!


Modules are cached under $ENV{PAR_TEMP}

Auto-updates with LWP::Simple::mirror
Download only if modified

Safe for offline use after the first time

May use SIGNATURE to prevent DNS-spoofing



Makes large-scale deployment a breeze
Upgrades from a central location

No installers needed
[download]

-Waswas

Comment on Re: Windows - have program replace itself Download Code

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Re^2: Windows - have program replace itself by SpanishInquisition (Pilgrim) on Sep 27, 2004 at 19:41 UTC
I like this a lot (only with the signature features), but if you have a nice shiny GUI program (which PAR is GREAT at bundling), I'm wondering how easy it would be to funnel PAR connection errors up into happy-shiny-GUI land...as well as whether one could produce "do want to upgrade, etc" type GUI's... If you wanted to upgrade a whole application this way, it would be fairly easy to have a simple shell with a go() method and have PAR download the entire application, then invoke the "go()". That way you would be free to completely rearchitect your app rather than fixing yourself to certain unbrekable interfaces. I'd probably just implement my own system though, with the launch.exe and a seperate goforthanddostuff.par ... and code my update interfaces around that. (preferably sftp with public keys that ship with the product, or something like that?)	[reply]

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Re^2: Windows - have program replace itself
by SpanishInquisition (Pilgrim) on Sep 27, 2004 at 19:41 UTC

If you wanted to upgrade a whole application this way, it would be fairly easy to have a simple shell with a go() method and have PAR download the entire application, then invoke the "go()". That way you would be free to completely rearchitect your app rather than fixing yourself to certain unbrekable interfaces.

I'd probably just implement my own system though, with the launch.exe and a seperate goforthanddostuff.par ... and code my update interfaces around that. (preferably sftp with public keys that ship with the product, or something like that?)

[reply]