Tips & Tricks

Tip: Using the option -cache option you can speed up your testing phase and experimenting with options a whole lot. The cache file format is as portable as the patch file format, so you can e.g. use the Win32 version to prepare a patch file by precreating the patch information and see say the Unix version be done immediately using that information.

Tip: Try to name your patch files with informative filenames. It should explain somehow what it does. A patch file called "update.exe" does tell the user nothing about the purpose of the patch. Prefer instead things like "v21_V22.utp" if you are bound to the DOS filename conventions or if not use "Update MySoftware 1.0x to MySoftware 1.1 patch.utp". This will allow to easily decide what a patch file does just from its filename. The example would tell the user that it's an update, that it's for MySoftware and can be applied to version 1.05 but not to version 1.2.

Tip: For minimum patch file sizes try to have the same compiler options when compiling programs which will be patched later. Otherwise you produce more (unnecessary) differences, resulting in bigger patch files. Incremental linkage should be disabled and a complete rebuild be done to guarantee that no changes must be made due to this.

Tip: The environment variable "BINPATCH_OPTS" is parsed by GenPatch every time you run it. Place there frequently used parameters like your "-Z" packer method choice, the "-pgp-path" for your system, etc.

Tip: (DOS only, not applicable to Win32 platform: The DOS/Windows version of GenPatch uses DPMI services to overcome the DOS limitations. But the Windows "automatic" DPMI-Service fails although you have enough memory. In this case create a special DOS-box link, edit its memory settings for DPMI from "automatic" to 32000 or even 65000 and retry. Background: Windows gives in "automatic" DPMI mode only a fraction of your physical RAM to DOS software, but this is hardly sufficient in all cases. We strongly suggest to use the native GenPatch for Win32 if you are using Windows 95, it will not have any problems with DPMI service limitations at all, but still is capable of creating patch files for DOS or Windows 3.1.

Tip: If you do not care about the date of files set, you can use "-time=apply" to disable embedding the date of files to be produced into the patch file and normally this will result into slightly smaller patch files and very slightly fast applying of the patch files.