Fedora Updates: whole packages vs patches

[Jorge Fábregas]

On Thursday 09 December 2004 6:10 pm, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Jumping in the discussion late.  What OP suggested is basically the way
> patches were handled in Solaris.  With exception that they are not named
> foo-patch1, but rater 232187-06 and you are left to guess which
> package(s) that patch will patch ;-)

HP-UX also uses this mechanism with their Software-Depot system (SD-UX) and it 
also has the weird naming conventions for patches. Also, a patch may 
supersede another one and so on...

I really wanted to find out if there was another good reason (besides 
simplicity) on having our current system. So far I think we can say these 
are the pros  & cons.

Whole-packages update system
----------------------------------------------
Pros:
- simplicity

Cons:
- package size overhead


Patch-based update system
--------------------------------------
Pros:
- no size overhead (in most cases)

Cons:
- manegeability


Jorge