When the ANT bundle recipe needs to deploy a bundle to a location on the agent, RHQ needs to be able to lay down a clean version of the new software and also needs to lay down an updated version (i.e. if the bundle was previously installed, RHQ needs to update it).

There is now code in the core/util module that can be used to update distributions given a set of zip files, set of raw files, as well as names of files to "realize" (i.e. replace replacement variables with values obtained from a template engine) and a regex pattern of files to ignore.

See org.rhq.core.util.updater.Deployer and related classes in its package.

For rules that it uses to determine what files to overwrite, what files to keep intact and what files to backup before overwriting, see:

http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-upgrade.html#S2-RPM-UPGRADE-CONFIG-FILE-MAGIC