Patches allows to focus change to single problem - single bug fix - nobody else in the market as well as I know offers this. Customer - like big corporation which do not usually want anything to change but certain bug being fixed, may choose to brought only what they need, not all new changes.
Biggest problem with patches is their revisioning and accumulation which is result of current procedure of releasing them. This accumulation actually turns this advantage to disadvantage, because in result patches became huge and contain almost all changes. Accumulation was introduced because before pdo, patchadd was not able to install set of patches at once and so mutual dependency (when patches depends on each other) was not possible and only way to deal with this was merging patches all together. Now when it is actually possible we may stop accumulating fixes in many revisions of single patch and merged Jumbo-patches. It is possible to stop using accumulation and revision patches - setting dependencies right. All patching tools - pdo for sure supports this already (with recursive patching - yam for patches it may be even better). The problem is that currently we has huge momentum and not able to switch to new way to deliver patches - this is like quick sand, hard to go away from it. vassun. This message posted from opensolaris.org
