Automating Affiliate Builds for Mac OSX

[lexaloffle]

Instead of manually creating a new build for each affiliate, it's better to have a system where affiliates can add the affiliate ID to the download URL. e.g:

http://www.retro64.com/download.asp?file=bugatron&afl=AID

One way to do this is to change the name of the file that is downloaded, and get the installer to record this information so that it can be passed on to the game:

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=862

Does anyone do something like this for the Mac?

My current plan is to keep the affiliate id in an external text file and generate a new archive, server-side, for each unique affiliate id request. So I would end up with a bunch of files on the server, which are identical except that affiliate.txt contains a different string.

ZenPuzzleGardenDemo_24836.tar.gz
ZenPuzzleGardenDemo_62331.tar.gz

When this cache gets to big, it would just delete all of the files and start again.

This would work fine for me as I don't have very large installers. But it's a bit ugly and not a good long term solution. Any better ideas?

[soniCron]

I don't know if it's applicable to the system you're using, but there was a big discussion about tacking the affiliate ID on to the end of the installer with a PHP script (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=3825), and the the installer reading that data and doing what it needs to with it. I don't know how much of it is possible with Mac executables, but it's a solid method for serving files without taking up much storage, though it's a little CPU hungry.