Why only for enterprise customers?
Wrong page, sorry. That was a response to graham working on dot dot releases for enterprise customers.
We’ve just started a new thing! Please read this announcement for all the information http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/246198-Unity-Patch-Releases That thread will be used as an archive for these releases so please keep your comments/questions to this thread.
Excellent initiative, but may I suggest that Unity going forward learns the art of
Large disclaimers which prevent little johnny from constantly trolling unity over unreleased feature x and bug y 
Nice going, awesome to see.
I’d heed Hippos advice, LARGE DISCLAIMER!
It’s good not having to wait long for serious issues to be resolved, little bugs you can live with.
You should pin the patch thread.
Very nice to see such momentum. I was beginning to think unity won’t do anything, but it looks very promising now.
Great news!
Excellent!
One question re support contracts: does having a support contract affect the likelihood that I can get particular blocking issues fixed? Can I effectively “buy” a particular bug fix through my contract?
NICE!
A fix for the editor hangs!
I am curious though, are the patch releases going to be strictly for bug fixes and limited to editor functionality? Working in a team, is there the possibility that if download a patch release it could affect shared code? For that matter will the releases generally be interoperable?
It’s not that black and white. One of the things some of us will be doing is triaging bugs. We have a gazillion bugs, so cannot possibly fix them all. We will use the issue tracker votes, how often QA and Support have seen bugs reported and discussed, and, yes, who’s reporting the bug. Some large studios have very close relationship with us. So, for example, we have weekly calls with some of our big customers. I know it’s easy to assume that only customers who pay a lot of money will get bugs fixed, but, in reality, they have the same issues that lots of customers have. So, we expect many customers will get bugs that they have fixed. There’s no “pay money and get bug fixed” at the moment. Down the road we might be able to offer this through our consultancy service, but that’s not being discussed at this time.
hmmm… to me, usually, a patch is a small release to actually “patch” a bugfix… this is more “intermediate full release”…
Could this be? Is that a 1gb file? My eyes must be deceiving me 
Um, well, we’ll have a go at fixing anything we see affecting lots of users. If we can make fixes to platform code we will. There is some changing in 4.5 that will allow platform code to be fixed without requiring a full editor release. This is the Package Manager aka Module Manager feature. (In 4.3.4 you can see that under Unity Preferences. It doesn’t actually do anything, but will in 4.5.) Basically the idea is that if Apple, say, made some breaking change and we needed to ship a new iOS runtime that didn’t call some old Apple API, we could ship to customers a zip file that contains this changed code. We call those Modules. So, there is a parallel effort in Development to ship more rapid, simple, small, platform fixes. We don’t know yet whether this will need input from the Sustained Engineering team.
A patch release is identical to the last official release apart from some bug fixes. So they will be 99.99999% identical. We will not test that a patch release is compatible with an official release. My advice would be to have everyone on the same version.
Yes yes we know. We decided to get the bugs fixed and shipped using the exact same release system we use for main releases. We don’t like it any more than you do. (So, to compute the md5 hashes for the forum announcement we had to download the releases which took us 30 minutes. They come from our servers in Copenhagen. We have a 1G network connection from Copenhagen and a 100M connection here in Brighton. That’s great but never fast enough to pull the editor installer.)
Once we have the new forum system, we can use the power of the crowd to up or down vote little johnny’s posts. If Johnny gets lots of up votes his view might be important. If he’s down voted out of existence we’ll say “what Johnny?”
This is very promising However I do agree that calling this a patch system is a bit misleading, those 1gb downloads are pretty hefty for the small bugs being addressed. Is it not possible to actually do patch updates with Unity?
No it’s not possible to do this. We don’t chose to do things just to annoy everyone.
So in a world of software development , when surrounded by developers that will constantly tell you anything is possible when it comes to writing code, your trying to pass off that it’s not possible? Your really saying that a separate patcher can’t be built? Does anyone really believe that?
(please don’t accuse me a trolling. this is a serious response, to your response, and valid to the post)
Oh gosh… trying this with software developers… ts ts…
Binary Diff - RTPatch → just saying…
It’s not that simple, one change in an engine may affect many other classes. So you end up just incrementally downloading tons of files anyway…
They could drop all example assets / scripts / post / etc. and release nothing but the core engine and you can download them from the asset store? Might save some space.