Huge delta when just bumping version number

I’m new to Electron and this installer.

When creating releases of the same codebase (just updating version in package.json) I get huge deltas. I don’t think thats normal…

Windows 32bit full nupkg: 40 MB Windows 32bit delta: 24 MB

Windows 64bit full nupkg: 49 MB Windows 64bit delta: 31 MB

Looking inside the delta .nupkg I see there are many .diff and .shasum files, however the main SmartFarmer.exe file has a .bsdiff and is also included as a whole (80 MB!).

The big .exe file obviously is the reason why the delta gets so big, but why is it included at all? What mistake could I have done?

I’ve seen https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/464 and https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/505 but I doubt they are related.

Running electron-winstaller with DEBUG=electron-windows-installer:main doesn’t show anything helpful IMHO - at least there are no errors / warnings. Dunno if there is some more debug information available somewhere (like a log file).

Using electron-winstaller 2.6.3

[adabru]

Thanks rufusl!!

Got the same issue. I’m using electron-forge and while rufusl’s fix is not merged upstream my workaround for now is to specify a constant appVersion for the prepackaging. With electron-forge/electron-packager it is:

package.json
{
  "name": "my-app",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  ...
  "config": {
    "forge": {
      "packagerConfig": {
        "appVersion": "1.0.0"
        ...
      }
    ...
    }
  }
}

As Squirrel is currently undergoing a maintainer-change, the upstream fix may take some time (several months to 1-2 years?). A solution to this issue could be duplicating the diff functionality from Squirrel to electron-winstaller and recreating the diff file after squirrel finishes.

EDIT: Originally I did falsely claim that I specify the appVersion option for createWindowsInstaller and the next post by baconbrad refers to it.

[rufusl]

When packing a new version, only small changes are made to the Electron executable (probably just changing some metadata like the version). I noticed that an exception is often thrown in Squirrel’s delta generation on that file, resulting in the full file being included in the delta. The patch in Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/pull/1421 fixes this error.