[pca] Dependent patches not installed

[Martin Paul]

Hi Josep,

> And now the second question. I have several patches which depend on other
> patches. PCA complains about not installing a given patch before the
> dependent patch is first installed.

Usually, pca resolves patch dependencies fine and will install patches 
in the required order. You've hit one of those cases where this doesn't 
work, and which has been discussed a lot in the past.

> This is an example:
> 125547 -- < 02 R-- 260 SunOS 5.10: zoneadm indirect dependency patch
> ...
> Patch 122660-10 needs to be installed before this patch can be
> successfully installed on this system.

There are two issues pca has to deal with:

Patch 122660-10 is not listed as a required patch for 125547 in the 
patchdiag.xref file. 125547 includes a prepatch shell script which 
checks for 122660 instead, which pca can't see.

Plus, patch 122660-10 is marked as obsoleted (O). Obsoleted patches are 
ignored by pca, as they should not be installed.

If you are interested in the gory details of why Sun did this, read:

   http://blogs.sun.com/patch/entry/problematic_solaris_10_patches

The workaround/solution, which is also mentioned in Gerry's blog entry, 
is to force installation of 122660-10 by using patchadd or specifying 
the explicite patch to pca, as in "pca --install 122660-10". You can 
then continue to install patches as usual, the rest of the dependencies 
should resolve just fine.

Martin.