Looking for a solution to "too many versions"

I've currently configured things so that each beta build of our products adds a version to our .wyp for that product.

For release scenario, that will lead to only a very few versions, not a problem.

But for beta builds, I'm currently on beta 29. Each beta version produces a delta of approximately 10MB. So if I had been using wyBuild from the start, that would be 290MB to upload for the current beta build, spread across 29 .wyu files.

This seems like overkill to me, and will be very slow to update our server (our outbound is only about 90KB/sec, so approximately 54 minutes per product, we have two that make sense to produce wyBuild updates for during beta, that's approx 2 hrs to upload the files for beta 30).

So, what I'm thinking is "how to implement a system to automatically delete out versions more than 5 ago..." (I'm not sure 5 is the right number).

I don't expect you guys to solve this necessarily - I can think of a way to generate the necessary .xml for the -add which removes the version N-6, and hence each time the the current set will be {N-5..N-1}.

However, perhaps you have thoughts about this? I noticed, for example, that one of your customers is doing a build every day. In which case he's going to have upload 365 deltas for the last build of the year.

----Similarly, I'm curious about how this might interact with the all.to.N.wyu deltas? For example, if I intentionally stop uploading (and delete from server) anything earlier than N-5, will such a version default to using the all.to.N file? Or will it error?

And if the all.to.N file is 40-50MB, then am I better off generating no deltas, and just generating the all-update? (Or maybe N-1 + all)?

However, perhaps you have thoughts about this?

We've considered adding this to wyBuild. On the one hand it would be great if wyBuild cleaned up old files from the server and from the local disk. But then there's the problem that if we do this automatically it will disturb some users. So we have to balance handling this automatically without surprising users.

We'll be adding this, I'm just not sure where in the timeline this will fall.

In the meantime you can just delete the files by date. For instance, if the files are older than say a month old delete them.

For example, if I intentionally stop uploading (and delete from server) anything earlier than N-5, will such a version default to using the all.to.N file? Or will it error?

When wyBuild uploads your updates it uploads all the *.wyu files first followed by the *.wys file. In other words if user check for updates while you're uploading your files they'll stilll only see updates to the previous version. It's not until the *.wys file is overwritten that your customers can get the latest upload.

So cancelling the uploads (when using wyBuild to upload) shouldn't cause any problems.

And if the all.to.N file is 40-50MB, then am I better off generating no deltas, and just generating the all-update? (Or maybe N-1 + all)?

It's very rarely better to generate a single "all.to.X" update file. Yes, you save a bit when upload to your servers, but you'll use much much more bandwidth when customers update.

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