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.
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