Sprint to get webOS 1.4.5?, Patch Update Problem Discovered

webOS 1.4.5 patch notes have made another mysterious appearance on Palm’s Web site.  Palm’s website shows ‘Sprint Pre’ on ‘SFR’ along with the version notes. As we saw before with the earlier leaked version notes there aren’t a lot of customer-facing fixes in webOS 1.4.5.  Interestingly, Palm’s English O2 page still does not reflect the webOS 1.4.5 update (though the German page has them).  Will Sprint and Verizon be far behind?  Keep reading for an important announcement about updating if you’ve applied patches to your webOS device:

If you are looking forward to updating and you’ve applied some patches you should be aware of a fairly serious problem with WebOS Internals’ Auto-Update Patch Technology (AUPT).  According to AUPT maintainer Eric Gaudet:

First I’d like to apologize because of my hiatus I have neglected known flaws in AUPT for too long. Although with the great development of the Save/Restore system started by rwhitby, I believe the worst case scenario will be very manageable.

Ok, so here’s the deal. Patches that touch multiple packages will not be able to remove/update after an OTA, iff the OTA doesn’t update all or none of those packages. These “problem” patches will be in a half-installed half-removed state and there’s nothing in AUPT logic that can get it out of this state.

The list of affected patches is:

• GestureClick Context Menu
• KeyToss Keyword Search
• Enable Verizon aGPS Server for Improved GPS
• Multi Mod
• SMS Tone per Contact
• SMS Tone per Contact v2
• No Auto-Off While Charging
• Scrim Multi
• Scrim Multi v2
• Scrim Multi o2
• Scrim Multi o2 v2
• Scrim Multi Verizon
• Scrim Multi Verizon v2
• Scrim System Screens

If you have these patches installed please be sure to remove them prior to applying webOS 1.4.5.  If you forgot, you can visit the link above for a remedy.

SFR/Sprint source: Phone Scoop