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: