[pca] pca -l missing

[Martin Paul]

French, David wrote:
> Anyway, the problem is with the new kernel patch being 137137-09, the
> '-l missing' no longer shows that any of the 137111-XX patches are not
> applied.   Thus, it looks like an Alert is satisfied when it isn't.  

Hm, follows patch obsoletions and ignores obsoleted patches in the 
missing list. It makes no sense to show patch A as missing, when it has 
been obsoleted by patch B. The real problem is that the Sun Alert will 
point at a (now) obsoleted patch. It would be interesting to know what 
Sun recommends in such a case - install the obsoleted patch A, or patch 
B which obsoleted A?

> So my question is, is there an easy way to get pca to output more
> information to handle this?  Or am I going to need to do all of the work
> myself?

I don't think that pca (alone) can help you here. It kind of hides patch 
obsoletions, so the information you need is missing even from its debug 
output.

Here's what I would do: Use "showrev -p | sed 's/Requires.*//'" to get a 
list of all installed patches *plus* the patches obsoleted by installed 
patches. For each of the Sun Alert patches, see if it's included in this 
list (check for revisions: installed >= alert). Collect missing patches 
and use "pca -l $missing" at the end to show all missing alert patches 
with pca. I guess you could pack all this into a 20-line shell or perl 
script.

Martin.