Script to perform auto-update of client hosts?

From: Fred (fred_at_acme.com)
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 18:46:41 +0200

Hi,

        I'm currently checking out what's available to add an
auto-update feature à la Yahoo/MSN to our Windows applications written
in VB.

Those that I checked so far require generating a list of files along
with a copy (full, or just a patched version) of each file, upload the
stuff to a www server, and have the client app download the list of
files to check whether it needs such and such patch.

To make it easier for developers, I was thinking that the actual work
of generating the list and patches could be done by a PHP script
directly.

Does someone know of such a beast, ie. go through the list of files in
the directory, generates a hash for each to give it a unique ID, build
a patched version of each file, build an INI file, and let the client
apps handle things from there?

Thank you for any tip
Fred.