[pca] Freezing on a date

[Martin Paul]

Hi,

> My next  question is how do I " freeze" patches on a certain date.
> 
> pca --minage=DAYS (always making sure to calculate from the day I' m running pca)

Not recommended. Most of the time, it will work, but you will get 
problems if required patches get updated later. Example: On July 24th, 
patch 111111-01 required 222222-01. Two weeks later, 111111-02 is 
released. While 222222-01 still only requires 111111-01, information 
about that rev. 01 will be gone from the xref file, and pca will show 
111111-02 in the list of missing patches, although it is newer than 
minage. There's not enough input data in the xref file for pca to ensure 
that minage alwats gives the expected result.

> pca --stop=ID (using this one to figure out what the last patch was on the date)

Wouldn't have thought about that one, but I don't recommend it either. 
Patch requirements can change over time, and this will change the patch 
order as well.

> pca --nocheckxref (and making sure I have the xref file from the date I want to freeze on?)

That's the best solution. You have the complete state of all patches and 
patch dependencies as of the date on which you froze the xref file. As 
pca doesn't user other input (from Sun) for its analysis, it's almost 
perfect. I say almost, as in rare cases Sun changes patch attributes for 
a patch even if no new revision is issued. 111111-01 might be the 
current 111111 patch today and two weeks ago, but it might be marked as 
"R"ecommended in today's xref while it wasn't two weeks ago. This is 
rare, and not a real problem. If you install "missing" (and not 
"missingr") it's no problem at all.

Hope that helps,

Martin.