[pca] Patch blacklist?

[Martin Paul]

Hi,

> Is there a way of completely blacklisting a patch in PCA without
> editing the script itself? --ignore (according to the docs, I've not
> had a chance to test) will apply an ignored patch if it's a
> dependency of another patch, so that may not work for us.

Yes. I'm not too happy about that behaviour of the ignore option either. 
Back when I implemented it, I decided that it would be too confusing if 
you ignore a patch in a config file, forget about it, and later many 
patches fail to install as they depend on the ignored patch. Nowadays 
I'd say that if you ignore a patch it should always be ignored. I'm 
hesitating to change the behaviour now, though. I will probably re-think 
the complete ignore/pattern option design at some time.

> The patches in question are the 120410-xx series - these cause our
> Oracle forms compiles to core dump, so we would like to exclude these
> until we can get a fix from Sun or Oracle.

An option would be to ignore both 120410 *and* the patches which require 
it - they won't install anyway, so ignoring them is a good idea. The 
quickest way to find out which patches depend on 120410 would be:

   $ pca --debug --list total | grep '120410... required by'
   120410-01 required by 120412: already listed
   120410-01 required by 120414: already listed
   120410-01 required by 121675: already listed
   120410-01 required by 125287: already listed
   120410-01 required by 121677: already listed

Hope that helps,

Martin.