The following sections explain the different issues with rebuilding Desktop Application Distributions, including how to trigger a rebuild:
All attributes contained in a golden Application object, not just the modified attributes, are updated in the distributed Application objects when a Distribution is rebuilt, sent, and extracted. This means that if you make a change to an attribute in a distributed Application object, such as a source path, that source path is overwritten by the source path data in the golden Application object. In other words, all distributed Application objects are kept in sync with their golden Application object. Exceptions to this are described in Maintaining a Golden Application's Attributes.
A rebuilt Desktop Application Distribution includes all file changes made after the last time the Distribution was built.
You can control when a Distribution is rebuilt in the following ways:
When you modify a Distribution object or one of its golden Application objects, its internal revision number is automatically changed, which triggers a rebuild of the Distribution according to its established Build schedule.
Modifications include adding or removing applications from the Distribution. However, if you simply update, add, or remove application files in the Distributor server's file system, this does not alter the internal revision number of the Desktop Application Distribution object. ZENworks' file synchronization feature does not apply to the files in Application objects. Therefore, no rebuild is triggered.
If you should add, remove, or update any files belonging to a golden Application object, those changes are included when the next rebuild is triggered.
Removing a distributed Application object causes a backlink to the golden Application object to change without any other changes being made to the object. This causes the internal revision number to change on the golden Application object, which triggers a rebuild of its Distribution according to the established Build schedule.