Subscribing applications
Subscribing applications
A new feature of Packaging PowerBench 4.0 is the ability to subscribe to packages from public repositories and thus have them automatically imported, converted to PPB package format and updated as soon as a new version of the package is made available.
Already since PPB version 2.0 you can interactively import packages from an external repository, a feature that is very popular with our customers. For common open source software and other utilities, the repositories are used to generate a base version of the package, which can then be invididually modified and adapted to your own requirements. A disadvantage of the manual import is that only the version available at the time can be imported. However, since current applications are developed very dynamically and new software versions are also regularly released to fix security-relevant bugs, for example, it is necessary to regularly check whether a deployed application has already been updated, if necessary. Especially if more than just a few packages are imported and used, this regular check can quickly become a time-consuming, mindless task.
To address this problem, the Package Subscription Service was introduced in version 4.0 of Packaging PowerBench. This allows subscribing to individual packages from the supported repositories and subsequently having them regularly checked for the availability of a newer package version. If the service finds a new version, it is automatically downloaded and converted into a PPB package. This means that the latest versions of your subscribed software packages are always available and manual checking is no longer necessary.
The feature is described in more detail in the following chapters::