Patching Adobe

(rant)

Dear Adobe:

I hate you.  I hate your face.  I hate your retarded patching system.  Why oh why can you not be less of a PITA?  Because people pay for your products, does this mean you're supposed to be a d-bag and make it even harder to patch your software?  People are getting slammed by Adobe exploits not because of the hackerz but because your patching from an admin perspective is as retarded as your face.

(example)

Administrative deployment

Administration Installation Point (AIP) deployments must not apply a quarterly update AIP in which a security update was the most recently applied update. Because a quarterly update includes the changes implemented in all recent security updates, the quarterly update forcibly bypasses those updates entirely. To deploy a quarterly update from an AIP, create a AIP which includes only quarterly updates as follows:

   Acceptable:      Acrobat 9.0.0 -> 9.1.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.1.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.2.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.3.3 (Quarterly) ->  9.4.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.4.5 (Quarterly)

   Acceptable:      Acrobat 9.0.0 -> 9.1.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.1.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.2.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.3.3 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.4.3 (Security) -> 9.4.4 (Security)

   Unacceptable:  Acrobat 9.0.0 -> 9.1.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.1.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.2.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.3.2
(Quarterly) -> 9.3.3 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.0 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.1
(Security) -> 9.4.2 (Quarterly) -> 9.4.3 (Security) -> 9.4.4
(Security) -> 9.4.5 (Quarterly)
----

So what this is saying is that to go from 9.4.3 to the latest which is 9.4.5, I have to go back to 9.4.2 and apply the update to 9.4.5 thus bypassing 3 & 4 because i assume they're all built into 5.  Wish i'd known this before i put a dent in my wall on fri last week trying to figure out why 9.4.5 wasn't applying to 9.4.4.

In closing, I hate you.  You're dumb.  No one likes you for anything but your money.  You uniqueness is not quirky but annoying.  You have products like Photoshop which are meant to make things look better by cheating reality but the fact is that you need to Photoshop your face because it's still dumb and i still hate it.

Sincerely,

Someone Too Sober.


-----EDIT-----

Patching Adobe with Administrative Install Points (AIP's) is starting to make more sense.  What bothers me is that you need to apply patches to the quarterly releases and not just the previous version number.  Theoretically you would work with a much lower version number in order to install the latest patch.  It makes sense somewhat now that I've had time to think about it.  Security patches are applied to fix something and then they tend to cause another hole which in turn needs to be patched.  We've seen Microsoft do this for years and so it shouldn't be much of a surprise.  There's very much a learning curve in all of this and trying to get used to how they do things.  My advice is to note what is in italics above and that will help you start understanding it.

Here are a few links that I have been using as a guide as I've worked on these Adobe updates:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/888/cpsid_88814.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/498/cpsid_49880.html
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/
http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/479

The last link has actually been a huge help for me!  I'd also like to note that the Adobe customization wizard is actually pretty nice too.  I had to use it the other day when I had to rebuild the install.msi file and got a chance to see first hand how powerful it can be.  Want to suppress the customary reboot at the end of install?  No problem.  Hide the EULA so this can be an unattended install?  Done.  Pesky icons on the desktop that no one uses?  Not a problem.

In closing, I'm still mad at Adobe.  Perhaps if it will buy me dinner while it tries to make up for the stress it gave me I'll forgive it but i seriously doubt that it will.  For better or worse, I'm stuck with it as long as I'm in my current position.