[pca] Using a White List with pca

[Fred Chagnon]

I have been trying to retrofit our current patching process to make use of
pca, however I've hit a bit of a wall.

In our environment there is a string mandate to control all patches that are
introduced into the environment. Therefore, we maintain our own patch
archives (one for each OS / arch) and the "blessed" patches get stored
there. I have been trying to use pca to install from this archive but the
more I try this the more I can see this wasn't ever really how pca was
designed.

I can specify the path to the archive (-P), but if a patch is missing or
outdated, pca will try to download it. This is a problem firstly because
from the client pca will not have write permissions to the patch archive,
and secondly because we likely have not inspected and tested the patch being
fetched. If I could simply have pca fail gracefully if the patch doesn't
exist in the archive and continue the attempt to apply further patches this
would be the best option, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.
Maybe I could supply a bogus patch to wget so that the attempt to download
new patches fails? *shrug* Is there a way to disable download attempts?

I tried to use the concept of the filename.txt as an argument to pca,
specifying the list of patches in the archive. The problem here is that pca
will then proceed to reinstall patches that already exist on the system, and
will also install patches that aren't required for that specific system in
question. So this isn't the whitelist I'm looking for.

While I'm a capable perl coder, I don't want to touch pca's code because I
would like to continue to receive the updates as necessary.

Is there a way to get pca to behave the way I want, or am I trying to put a
square peg in a round hole?

-- 
Fred Chagnon
fchagnon at gmail.com
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