Can RPM handle "patch" RPM files ?

[Martin Koller <koller etm at>]

Hi list,

we deliver our product in a RPM file. It contains a lot of executables and 
other files.
When now a bug is discovered in one of the files, we deliver a patch for this 
specific part of the whole product.
Up till now we did that via ZIP files, as this has the option to keep files 
which are newer on disk than inside the ZIP file.

I now tried to also ship a patch file packaged via RPM, which includes only 
the fixed components.
The patch rpm file has a different name as the original product, e.g.:
product.rpm contains all files of our product.
product-patch01.rpm contains only the patched files.

I need to use rpm -i --replacefiles product-patch01.rpm
to install the patch as otherwise I get an error
file xxx from install product-patch01.rpm conflicts with file from package 
product.rpm

The problem is: --replacefiles does _not_ check if the file on disk is already 
_newer_ than the one I try to install with the patch rpm (which might be the 
case when we deliver different patches which include different fixes to the 
same executable).

Is there any way to solve this or is RPM simply not made for this scenario ?

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