Way to Manage DAQ distributions

[CreviceDweller]

I need a better way to manage the DAQ distributions so that projects will always build without needing CDs that are several revisions out of date. 

This week I created a new project that required November 2007 CDs to build its distribution.  I have upgraded DAQ four times since November and can no longer find the November CDs.  I have successfully created and built several projects since November so assumed the November CDs were no longer needed.   I worked around the problem this time by deleting the minor reference to VISA, four layers deep in the .h include files.  That reference caused the builder to include VISA which was not yet cached so the builder asked for the old CD and would NOT accept a newer CD.

I first tried to reinstall VISA, but the DAQ CD is organized and named in a way that makes the VISA components obscure during the installation. (I'm not even sure VISA is on the DAQ CD). 

On a previous experience with this problem I deleted ALL NI software from the computer and reloaded ALL the software (this took hours). 

I only upgrade DAQ on an as needed basis, but there seems always to be a new need (We use and test several different DAQ products and upgrade CVI with each new release). 

Is there a better way to manage the DAQ distributions so that I don't need to retain ALL the old CDs?  I'm not really worried about disk space. 

[Mert_A.]

The key issue with deploying drivers is that dependencies are strict with respect to version. If component A depends on version 4.1.3 of component B, your distribution is going to have to include version 4.1.3, not 4.1.0 or 5.0.0. This requirement is magnified by the fact that most of the drivers have extensive dependency trees.

In CVI 8.0.x, the distribution builder would ask you for a specific source disk (e.g. "November 2007 Driver CD Disk 2"). You try to point it to a different path, but that path would still have to be that exact source disk. In CVI 8.1, we provided the ability to change the component source to a different disk altogether (e.g. "NI-VISA 4.0 CD" instead of "November 2007 Driver CD Disk 2") as long as it contained the exact same version of the component. In the next version of CVI, this will be taken one step further: at build time, you will be presented with a list of the required source disks, and you will be able to indicate "I don't have disk X" in order to get a different list of disks.

The easiest thing to do is really just to keep all NI CDs available in a wallet or some such storage. I could suggest copying the CDs to your harddrive or building an all-inclusive distribution to force caching of all components, but any solution that involves copying the data to a harddrive is going to have to be repeated for every machine you build distributions on, and this can take up a lot of disk space pretty quickly. You can save yourself a fair bit of time and hassle by always having the right source disks on hand.

Mert A.
National Instruments