OS (usually security-based) patches and patches released by the Microsoft community usually consist of, in my opinion, a series of updated DLLs or other binaries.
How do Microsoft and other similar companies guarantee that these fixes will not conflict with each other? Do they always use the cumulative patch approach, where one fix will include all the fixes in previous fixes? This doesn't seem to be the case, because many fixes seem to focus on fixing specific issues. If they are patch-oriented, how do they prevent one patch from one another (for example, incompatible DLL files installed with each other).
I have always admired Microsoft's ability to manage this process. The company I work on is much smaller, and when I worked on the fix process several years ago, we always took a cumulative approach, when one patch immediately replaced all previous fixes based on this version. This meant that the patches became larger and larger in size until the next "official" release came out.
What are some effective patch dependency management techniques?
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