[wpkg-users] Question about wpkg

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Luca,

Luca Manganelli wrote:
> Some questions:
> 
> 1) can WPKG download and install a package in background, while the user is working, not just before the login screen?

Yes it can. Basically WPKG is a service running in background. All its
tasks can be performed in background. The logon delay is just imposed if
configured on WPKG client. Nobody forces you to use this feature.
Personally I never used it in production.

However there are some constraints when running WPKG in background. The
user might start applications and due to this fact some upgrades might
fail (files locked while in use). So either you have to live with some
failures or you need to take this into account when building the packages.

For example a Firefox upgrade might fail in the background if the user
is currently running Firefox. To solve this you might use taskkill to
kill all instances of Firefox right before starting the silent
installation in background. However this kills the user session and the
User might not like it ;-)
Alternatively (how I do it) you might just run WPKG on Windows startup.
Usually logon takes a while and WPKG has enough time to run all updates
in the background even before the user runs a program. If it happens
that one fails due to the fact that the user was "faster" then proper
package checks will detect on next reboot that the package has not been
applied and WPKG just tries again.

In general this approach works pretty fine while not blocking the users
or giving them any hint that WPKG is doing something in the background.


> 2) same as before, can it do an uninstall in background ?

Same answer as above. Uninstalls where some files are locked might fail.
By the way most Windows-Installer packages handle this case pretty fine.
Locked files are just removed on next reboot.

br,
Rainer