Re: Does rpm support patching a binary rpm package?

[James Olin Oden <joden malachi lee k12 nc us>]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 Prakash_Nara@Dell.com wrote:

> Does rpm support patching a binary rpm package?
>
In short, no, as someone else has answered.  The long answer is that
you generally need to patch, because RPM supports the upgrading an 
rpm.  Essentially, when you upgrade an rpm (and this is abreviated)
it places the files from the new rpm on the system, and then removes
any old ones that are not part of the newer package.   The only case
I have seen where someone really had the need for a patch mechanism
was because they said there app rpm was very large and they wanted
to not force the user to download such a large package (or something
like that).  Course I firmly believe that in most cases like this
the package needs to be split into multiple packages with the proper
dependencies such that you can more easily surgically update 
sections of your program.  The only case I know of where this was not
an alternative was when someone was packaging some sort of firmware 
update that was pretty large, course in this case the sort of patching
that your talking about would not help because there is only one
big file in such a package.

Anyway, rpm upgrades usually make the need of doing a patching mechanism
non-existant.

Cheers...james