Patch My PC Ideas & Feedback
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize requests, 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 requests, please see:
The ability to customize the download URL would alleviate the problem of chasing mirrors/CDN redirects not listed in the PMPC firewall documentation. GIMP, with 14 US mirrors, is a perfect example and one that our Security team did not approve, requiring me to use the local repository feature to deploy.
The reason for this request is that many organizations are increasingly deploying internal repository managers such as Nexus Repository or Artifactory to control software supply chain risks. Security teams often require packages downloaded from public repositories (GitHub, SourceForge, vendor websites, etc.) to be inspected, scanned, approved, and cached internally before they can be used in production environments.
In highly regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, government, and critical infrastructure, direct downloads from public repositories are becoming more restricted due to security and compliance requirements.
A feature allowing administrators to override the download source URL per application would enable Patch My PC to continue managing updates automatically while leveraging internally controlled and audited repositories.
For most software in our catalogue, you would need to change the URL for every new version of the software. Some software use a "static URL" where the link does not change between versions (e.g. Google Chrome). Whereas other URLs are version specific (e.g. 7-Zip).
For this scenario, I would recommend considering the option Check the local content repository for content files before attempting to download content files from the Internet for the Local Content Repository in the Advanced tab.
This would allow you to download the binary from a preferred source and copy/paste the binary into the local content repository. This is a manual effort, but it would be no more manual than needing to manually update the download URL with every release.
If the download URL is static, then your feature request (in my opinion) would make a lot of sense. I do not know how many URLs in our catalogue are version specific and how many which aren't - I wish I had this data as it would help determine the value in the idea.