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

[Martin Paul]

Norman Lyon wrote:
> Wait....  Can't we just drop the '.$ARCH' concern and look at the REV=
> part of the VERSION?  From my initial checking, I'm seeing that the
> multiple package names are showing up with different versions.......

Seems as if we're getting to the very core of the problem. You are 
right, in your example one could ignore ARCH, as the VERSION is enough 
to differ between the packages; I had not noticed that yet. It's not 
valid for all packages, though.

I looked up the problem reports I got back in 2008/09 when I had added 
recognition of partly installed patches to pca, and it was exactly the 
packages which have the same VERSION for all *.ARCH packages which 
caused problems. Unfortunately this mostly affected kernel patches, so 
pca started trying to re-install those which made me retract the code 
quickly.

I've grep'ed for "VERSION" in Product/*.*/pkginfo now for Solaris 9 9/05 
and 10 10/08 now on my jumpstart server. Here's a list of affected 
packages for Solaris 10 (the one for Solaris 9 is longer):

   FJSVvplr.u/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2005.01.20.17.25
   FJSVvplr.us/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2005.01.20.17.25
   FJSVvplu.u/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2005.01.20.17.25
   FJSVvplu.us/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2005.01.20.17.25
   SUNWiopc.u/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2006.07.11.11.28
   SUNWiopc.v/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2006.07.11.11.28
   SUNWnxge.u/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2007.07.08.17.44
   SUNWnxge.v/pkginfo:VERSION=11.10.0,REV=2007.07.08.17.44

There are no problems when a patch includes e.g. both SUNWnxge.u and 
SUNWnxge.v, as then on both sun4u and sun4v the package will be patched.

The problem is e.g. 120011-14, which includes only SUNWiopc.v. So 
installing the patch on sun4u, SUNWiopc will not be patched, and the 
routine to find unpatched packages shows a false positive, as 
SUNWiopc:11.10.0,REV=2006.07.11.11.28 is installed but not listed in 
"showrev -p".

It's too bad - at the end, it's only a handful of patches which will 
break the detection routine for partly installed patches, but for those 
there's no standard way to identify them from xref data. Some kind of 
hard-coded whitelist would be necessary to ignore certain patches and/or 
packages, but it will be nearly impossible to really test this with a 
reasonable amount of time and effort.

Still - if you decide to implement and use your local check script, 
please let me know how it works out.

Martin.