Automatic Upgrades: A Hands-On Process

Annotation: Weiler argues that fully automatic upgrades are dangerous, since automatic upgrade mechanisms often introduce incompatibilities in the system. Part of the problem is that each vendor develops and deploys their own automatic upgrade system, and systems from different vendors don't work together (e.g., to detect and resolve dependencies and incompatibilites). Standards for automatic upgrade systems would help address these problems by allowing different vendors' systems to interoperate. Another thing that could help is a log of all changes made to a PC's configuration and a record of when problems occur. This helps users identify bad upgrades; these upgrades can be removed if they support ``automatic restoration'' (i.e., rollback).

BibTeX entry:

@article{weiler02automatic,
   author = {Robert K. Weiler},
   title = {Automatic Upgrades: {A} Hands-On Process},
   journal = {Information Week},
   month = mar,
   year = {2002},
   url = {http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020321S0011}
}