Patching strategy in Linux applications

[joby]

Hi,

My name is Joby Joseph. I am new user in the forum and to Linux OS also. I request all of you to help me to find out a "patching strategy" for an application which runs on RH Linux 7.* and 8.

I have a product which has the installation size of almost 300MB in a Linux machines. We want to send defect fixes for this product to customers as patches, which might contain few binaries, libraries and configuration files (the size of the patch would vary from 10MB-50MB max).

Our intention is to backup the files which we want to replace with the new files, then install the new files in the patch. Also we should be able to restore it back to the original files whenever we want to remove the patch from the system.

Are there any standard methods available in Linux (like RPM) to do this kind of patching mechanism ? Is RPM capable of patching Linux applications ? Did anyone in this group has faced a similar situation ?

Thanks in advance for the help,

Regards,
- Joby

[andutt]

You can always create your own rpm:s for this... i think that is a good approach, you can then use the common rpm command for installing and uninstalling applications and included files for them.. and use the rpm database for version handling and dependencies...

Regards

[Dolda2000]

I'm having a really hard time accepting binary distribution at all, but if you really want to, there is the xdelta program that you might want to check out. And remember, bzip2 is your friend.