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

[Martin Paul]

Norman Lyon wrote:
> My solution to the $PKG.$ARCH issue has been to cutoff the trailing 
> architecture letters, if they match my particular architecture, along 
> the lines of the following (please forgive the sloppiness, since this is 
> quick and dirty, and doesn't look at the patchdiag.xref yet).  If this 
> is too problematic, please let me know what problems you see with it 
> (minus the fact that it's slow), since I'd plan on optimizing this in my 
> code if it's not a reasonable fit for pca.

Not that I would claim to understand all details of your code, but I'd 
say that this should be fine. You are using the information from the 
patch zip file, which has one big advantage over patchdiag.xref - it 
contains all $PKG.$ARCH combinations which come with the patch. 
Therefore you have enough information to decide whether any of the 
packages in the patch has not been installed yet. patchadd works like 
that, too.

pca has to work with the information from the patchdiag.xref, as it 
can't download all patch zip files before determining whether they apply 
to a system. In the xref file the $PKG and $ARCH information is 
separated. While it includes all $PKG:$VERSION combos, the $ARCH values 
of all included packages are combined into one field. You can not judge 
which package is for which architecture.

It was a bad design choice, back when the xref format was created. It 
should use $PKG:$VERSION:$ARCH instead to make it complete.

Martin.