[pca] Create a --singleuser flag?

[Martin Paul]

Eric Ham wrote:
> However, I have run across the following 3 patches that require
> single-user, but do not require a reboot or reconfigure as stated in
> their respective README and patchinfo files.
> 
> 127755-01
> 128402-02
> 138247-01
> 
> If I were to run the --noreboot flag right now in multi-user then I
> believe it would install these 3 patches? Which I don't really want to
> do.

Yes, they would be installed. And they are good examples for the 
precision with how these patch properties are set. As far as I can tell, 
the singleuser property is just plain wrong for 128402-02 (installs only 
/etc/default/kbd) and 138247-01 (installs /usr/bin/cdrw). Both files are 
not held open by running processes, they aren't drivers, libraries or 
anything else which could be dangerous to replace in multi-user mode.

The README for 127755-01 is unclear, but I guess it suffices to disable 
the fmd service before installation of the patch.

> Instead, is there a way to make patches like these 3 not get installed
> with the --noreboot flag or perhaps create a new --singleuser flag or
> something similar that could be used to exclude these patches?

When I added support for the PATCH_PROPERTIES to pca, I looked at the 
patchinfo files from about 1650 patches to see how reasonable the 
properties are. The conclusion was that you can't really trust them; 
"noreboot" turned out to be the only one to be halfway useful. I found 
only a handful of patches which had singleuser but *not* noreboot, and 
for most of them the singleuser property was plain wrong, just like for 
128402 and 138247. So I decided that it's neither worth to add a 
--singleuser option, nor to treat singleuser as an equivalent to noreboot.

Hope this helps,

Martin.