Upgrading/Service packs... it's painful!

Any suggestions, or plans to do things better...

I just went from 2.1 to 2.1sp1 and had to re-do a bunch of skin related things.
I'm about to add sp2 on top so I expect I'm going to have to re-do the skin
changes and possibly some other stuff

Any plans to make a smarter upgrader, or perhaps a delta tool that at least
makes sure we don't miss any changes (got one client site that's had pretty much
every skin file touched in some way or another... they're still at CS 2.1)

For my onw one-blog site it's a pain, but not a show stopper (I'll do it in some
down-time over the weekend) but for major clients I suspect it's quite a pain
(esp if they're paying by the hour for changes/upgrades) but vital to avoid
problems (things like script injection attacks etc)

Have you tried to use WinMerge?  I guess you haven't.

Note that service packs only upgrade a few skin files (generally a few files in
whole application).  You don't need to change all skins files to make an
application compatible with service packs.

There is a full list of changes in SDK with SP2 that can help you to make
changes in code.

For skin changes you simply can use WinMerge to comapre files from two
applications and only modify/overwrite necessary files not all of those many
files.

There are some posts and advices about upgrading to Sevice Packs in an easy way.
 One of them is here by J-O.

Hope it helps.

I'll admit that I've not used WinMerge - my site is very simple with only a
couple of small cahnges between the default skin and my version

One client site (I'm not the developer any more because I now work for a new
company) have touched pretty much every file in their skins and a bunch of the
base files - an upgrade for them is a nightmare amount of work (or at least
according to the quote they've received it is!) - especially the retesting
that's going to have to go along with it :(

Roll on CS3

OffBeatmammal, 

I wasn't looking forward to applying the SPs either, but it turned out okay.  I
also did what I could to reduce the pain for others.  Urls below. And btw,
Winmerge is a MUST!!!

Regards,
Dave

http://dbvt.com/blog/archive/2006/11/16/dbvt-com-site-service-packed-and-sdk-sta
cked.aspx

http://dbvt.com/blog/archive/2006/12/06/aromatic-dbvt-com-community-server-2-1-s
p2-sensations.aspx

Beyond Compare is better!