I miss the days of software patches. The program might be 5 gb, but the update patch might be just a fraction of that, and it would apply itself to the installed files. Nowadays it seems more common (or at least increasingly) that the provider just makes you download the entire program in the latest version. So why is this done? It seems like a massive waste of bandwidth.
In: Technology
There are two issues with patches. Either you need a patch from every old version to the current version and every time you release and update to need to regenerate all these patches. Or you just create a patch from the previous version to the next version. If the user is out of date by several versions, then they need to download several patches and apply them all in order.
Neither is particularly difficult, it’s just one more thing to manage. Bandwidth is fast and cheap now, so it’s just easier to make the user download the whole thing again.
Latest Answers