Hi, what's the best practice when it comes to doing updates to daily builds? (Assuming you are not in a giant Houdini production-pipeline where you need to keep things as static and solid and working as possible). Just re-install everything except the servers & services? Is there no way to just get the updates?
I understand that technically a new build could break something, so you would want to keep your previous daily build installed. But I guess it's probably faster to just update relevant bits. And on the rare occasion that something actually breaks/doesn't work, you would do a full install of the working build.
Or am I looking at this wrong?

I just did a stopwatch run of a Houdini install on Linux. Using the interactive installer, and starting from the last “Are you sure?” prompt to the finished install, it takes a whopping.. 6 seconds (and the archive is coming from a network folder, not even local).

So why break up our neatly working system of clean, seperate installs for each build?

I can't imagine that SESI has plans to make Houdini open source and allow people to just update a repository.

Just keep an eye on the journal, and don't bother updating unless you see something in particular that you need. Maybe there's a few people out there that consistently require the daily fixes, but I'd bet the majority of people don't need every single build.

1. I do NOT encourage getting rid of the full daily builds.
2. On Linux you already have integrated systems that prevent you from installing the same stuff twice. Windows doesn't.
3. It takes a bit longer on my Windows system to install (even though I have an SSD). But that's not even my main concern.
4. My main concern is that I use an SSD for my software and the space is damn limited. - It wouldn't even be a big deal, but when I uninstall a previous Houdini version it also uninstalls the license manager. That's why I'm asking whether there is a better way… Anyways the whole process is tedious and seems superfluous (for presumably most Houdini Indie users).
5. If there was a build-in update-function, I think Side FX could save itself a lot of bandwidth.

A daily build doesn't over write the old version. It installs a new version. Just install the new version, then uninstall the old version. The license manager shouldn't be removed then, if it is then email support as that's a bug.

PS I would also say get a bigger SSD, but, so-called Indie users bitch and moan about any fiscal outlay when such ideas are presented :twisted: