Wabbajack 3.0 - RC1 and Why it Rehashes your downloads (Patreon)

First of all, I'd like to say thanks for all the people who have helped beta test Wabbajack 3.0 so far. Lots of bugs have been fixed, sometimes resulting in daily updates. The latest version 3.0.0.6 is still available for download and I'm deeming this version the "Release Candidate" that means that if I haven't heard of or seen major breaking bugs in this version in the next week, I'll release this version to everyone via the auto-update functionality.

So please, if you have time, download it and let me know of any bugs you encounter https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack-3.0-betas/releases/tag/3.0.0.6

I got some feedback on these past versions that Wabbajack was rehashing people's downloads. This can be a lengthy process if you have thousands of files, so I took a look into it and found some bugs.

Paths in Windows are case insensitive, and for the longest time we stored file hashes in our cache in a case sensitive manner. So if one part of the app says "what is the hash of c:\foo\bar.zip" that file would be hashed and the hash cached. But if later the program asks "what is the hash of C:\foo\bar.zip" well then it would see that the file isn't hashed and re-hash and cache the result. Since some parts of the app construct their path by combining other paths, and some get the values from windows or a .ini file, we never know what case combination we'll get at what part of the app. This is why, in 3.0.0.5 I switched to storing all paths in lowercase format, in the cache. But this means that now all the file need to be hashed once more and stored in the lowercase formatting.

Now it's true, that I could sit down and write a migration routine, resolve conflicts in the cache between colliding names, and then delete and entries in the old format, but that's a lot of code to write (that likely would have performance problems) for what essentially is a one-off reindexing of files the first time someone installs/compiles with WJ 3.0. So after looking into several options I made the decision to not try and make any sort of complicated conversion script and just tell people that 3.0 will need to rehash some files. I'm sorry for the inconvenience but hopefully the explanation helps soothe some fears that the app has suddenly gone wild.

As always please leave feedback or questions about 3.0 in the #bleeding-edge-testing room in the WJ discord. I'm in no major rush to get this version out, so we can let people test it for another week, but I would like to get development fully moved onto the 3.0 codebase soon. So get your bugs in now! :D