Creating Patch Files - RetroGuard Documentation

RetroGuard can apply obfuscation incrementally to your software's versions. This feature allows you to ship small patch files to your customers when a bug-fix or other modification has occured in your code, rather than shipping the whole software package again.

Incremental obfuscation

Normally, when obfuscation is applied to a Jar file, the obfuscated names bear no particular relation to the names in any previous or later version of your software. Even when the changes to your code are minimal there can be substantial changes to the name mappings, because of the process that RetroGuard uses to optimize the obfuscated name-spaces.

This restriction was overcome in RetroGuard v1.1 by modifying the format of the log-file, so that it can be used in place of the script file during obfuscation of a later version. The mapping entries in the log then act to restrict a later obfuscation process. The classes containing your bug-fix or feature addition can then be extracted and shipped as a patch file.

The general rule is, when creating a patch between an old version of the software and a new version, use the output log-file from the old version's obfuscation as the input script file to the new version's obfuscation. This procedure will be demonstrated below in an example.