On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 19:23 -0800, Pete Zaitcev wrote: > On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:55:11 -0500, David Hollis <dhollis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > I think there is a project that does this, and has been doing it for > > quite awhile. It's called Microsoft Windows. The problem that this > > method poses is that it's very easy to get to a point where you have no > > idea what the current real state of your system is. [...] > > Solaris used to have a similar system, where they had subpackages or > "patch" packages. IIRC, they got rid of it and switched to essentially > what we have now, for a few reasons. > Oh jeez, I totally forgot about that horrid mess! It seemed like Solaris 2.6 was just a patched-to-hell-and-back Solaris 2.5, which was patched 2.4, etc on down the line! > I am quite surprised that it works for Microsoft, because Sun gave it > a good try. Maybe they just ignore most problems, like what happens > when you upgrade a well-patched system to the next release. > I wouldn't really say that it does work with Windows. They are going so long between Service Packs these days that you wind up with somewhere on the order of half a million patches to install so the only way you can possibly keep up with it is to use Windows Update. What if you aren't on the network (like a secured LAN or just a standalone box)? You really can't go and find out all of the patches available and the order that they should be applied. It's beyond human comprehension at this point. Granted, the patch applier utils are supposed to take the version of the EXE or DLL into account to avoid overwriting newer ones. But with Windows' exclusive access issues, if you apply two patches that happen to update the same file, you can't really be sure which one will be the one that you wind up with after the next reboot. It's black magic and pixie dust and all of that good stuff. So in the end, you might have applied a patch and think that you are in good shape, but the other patch you applied actually downgraded you. There isn't an easy way to tell you if you are really honest-to-god up-to-date. -- David Hollis <dhollis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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