More on patches

There are discussions about the frequency of Fix Packs and Critical Hot Fixes. In a short period of time there have been 3 FPs released. Is the product filled with bugs?

Let’s take it from the top.
MHFs are supposed to be released once a month or so. That has not been the case recently. There is only one MHF (MHF1) available, and that patch was released in September 2006. That is almost a year ago.
CHFs and FPs are supposed to be released every week. They are replacements for Weekly Hot Fixes that existed earlier. These patches have not been released every week but almost every month.
Is CHFs/FPs replacing MHFs? The answer is no. There is no information from Business Objects stating that this system has changed. Read my previous posts about patches for more information.

If you look at the patches and compare them with SPs you will see that it's not that many CHFs/FPs that has not been included in any SP.

I did a little study of my own (with reservation of my accuracy!).
We begin with CHFs. CHF13 to CHF16 are included in SP2. That leaves us with CHF17 and CHF18. Two CHFs are not that much.
If we look at FPs I did a comparison of the ADAPT numbers in CHFs and ADAPT numbers in FPs and it shows that FP2.1 and FP2.2 is pretty much a CHF17 and CHF18 but for the SP2 environment. If we look at numbers there were 16 ADAPTs in CHF17 and CHF18 that were not included in any of the FPs. And in reverse there were 159 ADAPTs in FP2.1, FP2.2 and FP2.3 that I didn't find in CHF17 or CHF18. Most of the 159 differences where found in FP2.3 which could mean that it solves issues isolated in the SP2 environment (e.g. new features in Productivity Pack). There may also be a CHF19 soon that corresponds fairly against FP2.3.

The patching system that Business Objects is using is not that different from other software vendors. The other companies may have different terms for their patch packages but the system is almost the same. It's very common that you only see the SPs and not any fixes/patches/updates on those companies web sites. But if you have an issue and call their support you will discover that hot fixes exist very much indeed.

I will leave the answer to the question I asked earlier in the post open... Perhaps someone else has a comment on this?