Periodically we receive announcements of new maintenance builds of Oxygen XML Editor. It's easy to locate documentation on installing new versions, but I was unable to find any instructions on installing maintenance builds.
In the past I've renamed the downloaded folder, e.g, "17-1", which completely duplicates all the files in Applications (I'm using OS X), then later on deleted the older folders when it seemed safe to do so.
I would like to know the best-practice, most efficient way to routinely install these frequently released maintenance builds.
Since there is no Oxygen installer for OS X (it's just an archive), there is no straightforward way of upgrading (installing in the same folder), like there is for Windows or Linux.
The official upgrade procedure for maintenance builds (it's the same for minor version updates) goes like this:
To upgrade:
For Windows and Linux you can install the new build in the same folder as the previous installation, it will automatically upgrade it. Before you upgrade, if you have added files or made changes to any of the files from the Oxygen installation folder (especially the frameworks folder), you may want to create a backup of them because they will be overwritten during the upgrade procedure. Custom frameworks will be preserved but we recommend backing them up anyway, just to be safe.
For Mac OS X you will have to either move the old folder from Applications to a different location and put the new version of Oxygen in its place, or install in a different folder. You can then copy any files you may have changed from the old folder (if any) to the new folder.
The Oxygen preferences will be preserved since they are located elsewhere (user home folder).
What I'd like to add is that, if you have custom frameworks and want to keep Oxygen up to date, it's a good idea to keep the custom frameworks in a different folder (from your user home) than the Oxygen installation folder and simply configure Oxygen to load them from that folder (Options > Preferences, Document Type Association > Locations, Additional frameworks directories). This greatly simplifies the upgrade procedure.
Regards, Adrian