Rollback patch following installation

I’m trying to use Paquet builder to create a patch which will install updated DLLs to an application, so far its working well but I need to evaluate some other issues.

Following the installation of the patch, I would like to have a facility to roll back the patch (say if the user wants to revert back to previous DLL levels due to a problem with the patch) and leave the application in its original form before the patch was applied.

I can see that another patch could be provided with the original DLLs, but I would like to have a facility to just ‘undo’ the patch installation.

Is there any way this could be achieved with Paquet builder?

You could use custom actions to copy existing DLL files to some backup folder before overwriting them, and create a specific package to restore them if the user decides it.

It’s possible to create packages to perform some actions only (with no file unpacking). Just add a dummy small file to the File Manager, and add an Exit Package custom action in the Before File Extraction event.

Setting up custom actions would require all of the files to be re-stated in custom code, rather than linking them automatically to the list of files in the File Manager.

It would be a nice feature to extend the File Extraction options to have a ‘Rename existing’ file option so that each file extracted could cause the existing file to be renamed or maybe copied to a new folder, this would then prevent all of the files being re-stated in a custom action.

I thought in the past about a special event that would be fired for each file while unpacking. This event would allow users to run custom actions, change the file destination… In your case, this would be helpful since you could make a copy of each file to the backup folder, add a reference to some backup log…
I’ve added the idea to our TODO list, since in PB 3, we have more freedom for such possibilities thanks to the C compiler.

Sounds like a good idea, any estimates when PB3 may be available (weeks, months, years)?

PB3 is already there. Next update will be published in some weeks.