Our Karaf instances use the fileinstall deployer to monitor a conf/ directory for changes to KAR and configuration files. The directory containing these files is deployed from a central location, and to enable fast rollback on error we redeploy to a new directory every time and use conf/ as a symlink pointing to the current active config directory.
The downside of this is that even if we only change configuration, the KAR file registers as changed because it is a new file (though it has the same name, version, size and checksum) and redeploys, so there is no way to do runtime config updates without service interruption. I like our linking approach because the change is atomic, and leaves it up to Karaf to handle the update ordering as a batch - but the forced restart is unfortunate. Is there any way get around this? Currently I am looking at implementing a manual KAR deployer that does do these checks first, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
