Pushing betas to certain users

Hi guys,

I have a situation where I want to push betas to certain users only. Each user has some ID associated with their installation, and I would like to be able to define which ID's are allowed to download the latest update (whilst all other users have to wait).

I noticed in other threads you mentioned "update channels", and this may solve my problem, but when do you forsee this feature being released?

My problem is essentially only two channels. The current release, and the current beta (of which only a user subset can download). Would you have any suggestions of how to overcome this right now? I will happily purchase wyBuild for the dev team if this can be solved.

We're adding proper channel support to wyBuild 2.7. Here's the schedule: we're finishing wyBuild 2.6.15 this week. Then after we release that update we're finishing these large features for wyBuild 2.7 which should come at the end of August (if all goes according to plan).

Now, you can already do a limited form of "update channels" by using separate projects for each channel. Let me explain.

First create 2 projects: 1 is your "Stable channel" project, the other is your "Beta channel" project. They will be identical except for 2 things:

  1. The versions they contain (that is, your stable channel will only contain stable versions, your beta channel might contain both beta and stable versions)
  2. The server download site.

For instance, in your "stable" project you might have a download site like this:

http://example.com/updates/%file%

In your "beta" project you might have a download site like this:

http://example.com/updates-beta/%file%

Then in each of your projects you can build the updates and upload them to your server. You'll also "build wyUpdate" for each project. You'll have a "beta" client.wyc file and a "stable" client.wyc file.

Distribute the appropriate "client.wyc" for whichever user subset.

I can also explain how you can "dynamically switch" a user from one channel to another using the "-server" wyUpdate commandline switch. This will all be much much easier in wyBuild 2.7. It will all be in a single project and there will be clear options.

Does this all make sense?

Yeah thanks.

It seems doable on a basic level in it's current form, so if you see the update coming in the next couple of months thats great. Just in case it gives you any extra ideas about your channels functionality, i'll elaborate my ideal solution.

Each installation has an ID attached. When the user attempts to do an update, the ID is sent to the server, which decides the version to deploy. When building versions, it would be nice to be able to attach a list of ID's to that update, so only those installations can get that version. In other words, my user subset will be changing quite a bit from version to version, so an easy way to handle this would be nice.

I was looking for the best way to implement this type of arrangement (where some users get beta/test updates) and came across this thread. What is the status of this feature? Is version 2.7 on the horizon and will it incorporate something that makes this process simpler?

Tom

I second that question. I'm evaluating wyBuild and so far it works very well.

I will try your suggested workaround with two projects, though.

Thanks.

I'm in the same situation and I've reinvented this same solution.

However, I would like to generate by program one wyc from the other. In detail, my project produces directly client.wyc for beta users. How would I produce the client.wyc for normal users - without recreating by hand the normal project from scratch ?

Reply
Discard post