Mechanism for determining applicability of software packages for installation

This application is a continuation of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/918,614, filed on Aug. 13, 2004.

The present invention relates generally to computer systems. More particularly, this invention relates to mechanism for determining applicability of software packages for installation.

Most popular software products nowadays constantly go through revisions to fix “bugs” or add new features and functionality. To that end, each revision of a software product or component may require the addition of new files, the replacement of existing files with newer versions of files, and/or removal of a file. Once a vendor has isolated a software product problem and created a solution for the problem, they would want to put that fix into an update and make the update widely available to the customers. Software vendors have a business incentive to distribute software updates to customers as quickly and trouble-free as possible.

The Internet provides a channel for customers to obtain the latest updates for software products. The vendor sites on the Internet can be designed to make it very simple to discover and locate updated files for an application. The technical aspects of file downloading have mostly disappeared from the user\'s view, and are now typically handled by the operating system.

To minimize the size of the updates over the Internet, software companies utilize file patches, which contain only the changes that must be made to pre-existing files, rather than the whole files themselves. A patch assumes that the original file on the target system is of a specific state. “Patching” applies changes to that file to bring the file to a desired, usually newer, state. However, the file should be verified to be in the required condition. Otherwise, the patch may be incorrectly applied and the file may be damaged. If a file to be patched is in an unexpected state, the patch cannot be applied. In addition, if the client machine has a sub-component that has a newer version than the one about to be upgraded, a conventional installation may abort the whole installation, even though there might be other sub-components that have older versions.

Mechanism for determining applicability of software packages for installation is described herein. In one embodiment, a process is provided to retrieve authentication information for a component from an installation descriptor file, where the descriptor file describes installation information pertaining to the software package. The software package may include one or more components and each component having zero or more sub-components. For at least one sub-component of at least one existing component that has already been installed, an image of the sub-component is authenticated using an authentication key extracted from the authentication information, to determine whether the component can be installed based on the existing version of the component.

Other features of the present invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description which follows.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The present invention is illustrated by way of example and not limitation in the figures of the accompanying drawings in which like references indicate similar elements.

FIG. 1 is a diagram of a network of computer systems in which one or more clients may download and install a software package from a server.

FIG. 2 is a block diagram illustrating an exemplary component descriptor of an installation descriptor file according to one embodiment of the invention.

FIG. 3 is a timeline illustrating a version timeline of a software package upgrade according to one embodiment.

FIG. 4 is a flow diagram illustrating an exemplary process for installing a software package according to one embodiment of the invention.

FIG. 5 is a block diagram illustrating an exemplary document-type definition (DTD) file of an installation descriptor according to one embodiment of the invention.

FIGS. 6A-6D are an example of an installation descriptor file written in XML according to one embodiment of the invention.

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Previous Patent Application:
Method, system, terminal and device management server for installing software components
Next Patent Application:
Electronic device and user interface display method thereof
Industry Class:
Data processing: software development, installation, and management

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