Patch Control Mechanism for Large Scale Software
Atsushi Futakata
Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI)
Abstract
Applying patches to large scale software is often difficult
because unofficial patches and user modifications conflict with
any ``official'' patches. Version control systems such as
RCS[1], CVS[2], and configuration management[3,4,5] are useful
solutions for this problem when the baseline of the software is
fixed. However, an official patch that is developed externally
changes the baseline and any local changes based on this become
obsolete. Thus we must re-apply various unofficial patches and
modifications, identify the causes of conflict, change or remove
patches, and repeat the patch and unpatch operations.
This paper presents a mechanism for (1) managing versions of
a software package based on patches, (2) automating the
application of unofficial patches and modifications by the user,
and (3) rebuilding the package using file versions instead of
timestamps. Using this mechanism, it becomes easy to apply
patches and re-build software.
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