Upgrade from Setup Factory 7

[mnijdam]

Our organisation still uses Setup Factory 7 and is considering upgrading to 9. Mostly so we can upgrade our buildmachines to a more modern platform. We can't get Setup Factory 7 to run on Win 2008 R2 servers.

How much effort would upgrading to SF 9 cost, taking in to account the following factors:

• We use a lot of quite complicated (and horribly spaghetti-coded) LUA scripts
• Our MSBuild scripts directly manipulate the Setup Factory XML project files
• Our current automatic build proces has some quirks, but it works and we don't predict we will have to change much to the LUA scripts or SF projects in the future

So it comes down to the following questions: will we have to refactor the SF 7 LUA to work with SF 9? Are the project files still in the same XML format? Can we use the existing project files?

If anybody has a tip to get SF 7 to work on a modern server, that would also be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Michiel

[Ulrich]

Setup Factory 9 still uses project files in XML format, but this format changes slightly at each new release, as new project options are added. The conversion from a project file created with an earlier version (like 7 or 8) of Setup Factory is painless, and the original file is not changed in the conversion. As the Lua engine was updated, you may need to adapt your code slightly if you used an older version. Sadly, converting a project from 7 to 9 won't fix any "spaghetti code" during the process.

Ulrich

[mnijdam]

Thanks for the response. This removes most of my worries.

But could you be a little more specific what you mean by "you may need to adapt your code slightly"?

Are there specific functions that are deprecated or have a changed syntax? And will these "slight changes" manifest themselves in errors during compilation or do we need to do a full regression test to find out if and where we need to modify the code?

And of course I don't expect an upgrade to magically improve our code

[Ulrich]

Please see the sticky posts - the changes in the Lua syntax are documented there, and of course also in the docs - and finally in the projetc conversion report.

Ulrich

[mnijdam]

Thanks. I looked through the forum for this information, but somehow missed some vital info in the sticky posts. The language changes seem quite minor so the impact should be low. We mostly use external Lua files, so the automatic detection won't work for us, but I think looking for for-loops in the files should cover most of the necessary conversion.