There's two approaches to distributing updates; you candistribute entire new versions of packages, or you can usesome sort of 'patches'. For essentially historical reasons , commercial Unix vendors generally use thelatter approach.

Here is something important about this: if you have patches, patchmanagement needs to be part of the packaging infrastructure, even if itis not done with the package management system and commands. It cannotand should not be something that is just slapped on over top.

Here's why:

This is a sysadmin war story.

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of IMAP servers. Since this waslong ago, they were running Linux with the 2.4 kernel. They startedout storing their mail on locally attached 72 GB SCSI disks, organizedsimply with one ext2 filesystem per disk, but then they moved thestorage to a faster and more sophisticated SAN backend with RAID-10arrays (still on small fast enterprise disks), giving each server node asingle logical array (