[pca] patch order?

[Martin Paul]

Hi Pete,

> 1.	We discovered that PCA, when downloading "recommended and
> security" patches will identify *many* more patches than Sun bundles in
> their "Recommended" bundle! (this appears to be a problem with Sun
> marking them as "recommended", but then for some reason, not including
> them in their own bundles),

Yes - the Recommended flag on certain patches and the contents of the 
Recommended patch cluster are not the same. It seems as if they only 
share the name, nothing else. Strange, but that's how it is.

 > In any event, we want to
> build our own bundles based on what PCA is telling us, but the problem
> is...PCA doesn't build a "patch_order" file for us to order our
> patches...which is something SUN provides in their bundles.

You can massage pca's output to about any format you like. Here's an 
example to get a kind of patch_order file of all missing patches:

   pca --noheader --format '%p-%c' > patch_order

> 2.	 When I request PCA to download a specific Solaris patch(s) for
> installation later, PCA doesn't appear to also bring down it's dependent
> patches.  Is there a way to do this using PCA?

It depends on how you specify the patch id to pca. Without a patch 
revision (e.g. 123456) pca will list/download/install required patches, 
too. With a full patch id (123456-78), only this exact patch will be 
downloaded.

There's actually a good reason for that. As the xref file doesn't 
include information about past patch revisions, pca simply can't create 
correct dependencies for such patches. It only know about the 
requirements of e.g. 123456-78, but not 123456-77.

Martin.