Patent ID: 7765538

Claim:
A method of selecting patches having patch attributes and successor patch relationships among a set of patches to recommend one or more patches for installation on a computer system comprising: selecting one or more patch analyzer programs from a collection of such programs; executing each selected patch analyzer program to analyze the set of patches in comparison to the computer system and the patch attributes containing information associated with the set of patches, causing each selected patch analyzer program to generate one or more issues associated with patch installation by processing the set of patches to identify one or more patches compatible with the selected patch analyzer program from the set of patches and with the computer system's installed operating system, programs, and patches; identifying goals to resolve one or more of the issues through the installation of at least one of the identified one or more patches or a successor to the one or more patches based on the one or more patches, the one or more issues, and patch dependencies; and generating mutually consistent patch installation recommendations from the identification of the goals that satisfy as many goals as possible and that satisfy the patch dependencies of the one or more patches on the prior installation of other patches, based on patch attributes and successor patch relationships among the patches, each recommendation including a coordinated set of proposals to a user to install the one or more patches to achieve a given subset of the goals while satisfying the patch dependencies.