[pca] PCA not reporting on patches that may need to be re-installed

[David Stark]

Alexander Skwar wrote:
> Hello!
> Cmiiw, but I think that this severe limitation exists, because in
> Solaris, there are patch "packages". I see this in contrast to, lets
> say, Debian, where there are no such patches, but instead they release
> updated (iow, patched) packages. If Sun would have chosen that
> approach as well, then that issue would not even exist, would it?
> Does anyone know, why Sun has made that design decision back in the
> days and why they still stick to it?
> I know, that is off topic here, so please forgive me :)

My guess is that bandwidth was expensive and limited, so it made sense 
to supply patches rather than full packages. Sun loves backwards 
compatibility and making admins work hard, so that's probably why it 
stayed.

Solaris 11 should use the new IPS package system, which will hopefully 
put an end to this mess. Hopefully. (Assuming, of course, that IBM 
hasn't bought Sun, GPLed all the interesting bits, and axed Solaris in 
favour of Linux before Sol-11 makes it out the door...)

> 2009/3/21, David Stark <dave at davidstark.name>:
>> Norman Lyon wrote:
>>> I've run into problems where a patch may need to be re-installed if
>>> someone has added a package after patching.  PCA does not seem to catch
>>> this.
>> As far as I'm aware none of the automated patch tools available for
>> Solaris will catch this - they all use 'showrev -p' to check what
>> patches are installed. It's one of the many quirks that makes patching
>> Sun boxes so much fun.
>>
>>
>