Patch My PC Feature and Application Request
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize request, please see:
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize request, please see:
Microsoft has selected Azul Zulu OpenJDK as the preferred Java environment for Azure. Like Amazon Corretto for AWS, it therefore makes sense to add this OpenJDK distribution to the PatchMyPC repository
Moving this to planned.
We are going to be trying something a bit different with this app, and may take the behavior over to the other Java releases if this works well. We am looking for feedback on this:
Currently (for Oracle Java), we create a new product in the catalog for every major Java release (11, 14, 15, etc.), and only allow our updates to update existing versions of java that are of the same major release. We believe this is counter to the intentions of these latest releases of Java and are proposing the following (only for Zulu OpenJDK at this time).
In the catalog, we will have the following Products:
Zulu JDK Latest
If this product is selected and deployed, the latest JDK version available will be deployed, this product will upgrade all versions of Azul OpenJDK on applicable devices to the latest available.
Zulu JDK 8
This product if selected and deployed will only upgrade existing Zulu JDK 8 installations to the latest version of Zulu JDK 8
Zulu JDK 11
This product if selected and deployed will only upgrade existing Zulu JDK 11 installations to the latest version of Zulu JDK 11
Switching to this method will allow our customers to choose if they want to patch OpenJDK to the latest available, or stay on a supported LTS release. As new LTS releases come out, Patch My PC will add them as new products and provide update definitions until that LTS release hits end-of-life.
1 major drawback to this new method is that deployments for this new methodology is that if both "Zulu JDK Latest" and any of the Zulu JDK LTS releases are selected as a product in Patch My PC, there is a chance of 2 updates being applicable on a single device (say if Zulu JDK Latest and Zulu JDK 8 are both selected and deployed to a device with an old version of Zulu JDK 8, that device will get both updates as applicable and the version that the device will end up with is Zulu JDK Latest).
The benefits of this new method are:
Customers will not need to update their product selections as often
Customers will be able to update to the latest version of Java without an application deployment (Zulu JDK Latest will update any version to the latest, so app deployments to update between major versions are unnecessary)
Patch My PC will not need to create a new product for every new release of Java every 6 months (Adding a new product node to the catalog is more time consuming than adding a new update for the same product)
Customers will have a clear choice between staying on LTS versions or following the latest Java release.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! Please help us improve the product by providing any feedback on this methodology, and let us know if there is anything we can improve here or if there are flaws in our logic!
I just wanted to let you all know we haven't forgotten about this request. We are working through some others at the moment that more unique customers are following. If any others come across this idea, please vote it up if it's one you would like to see added.