Deleting Old Upgrade Kits

Sometimes you might want to purge older upgrade kits to free up some space used by these upgrade kits. When you purge old upgrade kits, you must make sure that users will not encounter errors when they retrieve upgrade kits that are expecting to use information from upgrade kits that have been deleted.

Two groups of users can be adversely affected when old upgrade kits are deleted, new users and infrequent users. For example, assume that your end users belong to the same configuration. Also assume they are currently using version 3 of Siebel Client Customer Revisions and version 4 of SRF.

If you were to delete all the previous Siebel Client Customer Revisions and SRF upgrade kits, then a new user might have trouble with Siebel Client Customer Revisions if you start from version 0. This situation occurs because Siebel Client Customer Revisions upgrade kits often depend on the previous versions. If a new user needs version 2 in order to gain access to version 3, and if version 2 is deleted, then Siebel Anywhere would not be able to provide the new user with version 3. However, the new user would be able to install version 4 of the SRF, because SRF upgrade kits do not depend on any version history.

The correct way to handle this situation is to keep an updated installation for new users where each of the upgrade kits has been installed. You can do this by creating a package periodically and making the most current package available to new users. This method addresses the problem for new users, because they always install a client with up-to-date configurations.

However, do not delete old upgrade kits as soon as a new package is created. There might be infrequent users in your organization who have not logged in for months. While the rest of the company is using version 3, the infrequent users might still be on version 1. In this case, it is up to the individual Siebel administrators to assess the situation and determine how old the upgrade kit must be before deletion.

Sometimes you have a few upgrade kits of the type Customer Revision that were distributed long ago. Use the following procedure to delete them. Use the same logic if you are planning to delete any other upgrade kits.

To delete old Customer Revision upgrade kits 

1. Establish one installation that includes all the Customer Revision upgrade kits ever installed.

2. Create a package from that installation.

3. Set up each new user with the package prepared in Step 1. This provides new clients with the files that were distributed through the old Customer Revision upgrade kits, and also provides new clients with the correct version of the clntrev.cfg file.