Revision of a course : how to keep the same Manifest ?

The new manifest is generated because it's the safest way to prepare a course for an LMS and not break it. Most, if not all, course tools will do that by default.  The tool doesn't know you are only updating a course already uploaded. It is doing as it is supposed to, generating a unique manifest.

But it doesn't matter in simple cases. An LMS treats the manifest as a packing list and needs it ONLY when you are first uploading a course, or when you are replacing/versioning the course (the exception to this is if you are on an LCMS). If you try to replace the manifest without versioning, an LMS is supposed to block it.

However, for a simple swap out of an asset, that does not impact navigation or logic, I have found the easiest solution is just to drop the asset into the exact directory on the server so it overwrites just that file. This goes for images as well as html (as long as changes to the html are only cosmetic).

As long as you are only changing flat assets, and not disrupting the flow of the course (which would mess up bookmarking), it should be transparent to learners.

The LMS, in this case, doesn't care that you replace a static file. it simply points to it. I have often used this method for simple changes without issue on SumTotal, Oracle, Scorm cloud and others.

Most of the time, I am too lazy to look for the one file in the output, so if I know for a fact that nothing else has changed, I will just drop the whole structure, minus all the xml files, into the directory overwriting everything even though the majority of files have not actually changed.

Mind you, this is not a substitute for versioning a course, changing the navigation/logic in a course or adding/removing pages. For that, you should upload the whole package with new manifest. This shortcut is only for simple asset replacement where there is no impact to the course flow.

I have been at companies where IT (or whoever admins the course server) will push back on dropping a file into a directory. But I can usually get cooperation when I compare it to updating an image or text on a simple webpage.

I hope that helps.

Russ