automated patching

mazz Feb 3, 2005 4:27 PM

Thinking about patching JBossAS and other products, we are trying to think of ways to do it. Any one know of an open source product that either:

A) performs automatic download and/or installation of patches

or

B) provides an API that enables the auto-download and/or installation of patches

There are tons of commercial apps that do their own thing to distribute and install patches (from Windows XP to Oracle DB to whatever); other than Eclipse and its nice Update Manager, can't think of another open-source project that does this.

This is just the beginning of the thought processes regarding how we will do patch delivering and installation in not just JBossAS but hopefully many or all of the JBoss-suite of open source projects.

Ideas/opinions are welcome.

1. Re: automated patching

genman Dec 20, 2005 10:32 PM (in response to mazz)

Old topic, I know. And I think your JBoss enterprise services has probably implemented this.

The simple solution is to have a list of resources (.jar files) and include version information in each one (MANIFEST/?). When running the update program, it would open each .jar file, decide which ones were out of date and replace them.

For configuration files. Each one can contain a CVS version tag and you could simply apply "patch" to each file to update to a CVS version.
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2. Re: automated patching

starksm64 Dec 22, 2005 11:56 AM (in response to mazz)

One thing that intersects with this is a jems type of installer that would have a net install and net update mode.

Both eclipse and netbeans have plugin update capabilities. The Sun Java Enterprise System (http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/) is supposed to be open sourced and has a patch management system. Its available for free download from here (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp), but I don't see any source as yet.
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