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

[Martin Paul]

Norman Lyon wrote:
> I see what you see in S9 and S10.  I don't care about S8, but the story 
> is a tad more complex with more than just 2 architectures (sun4[dmu]).

Yes. And for me, who'd be interested in a fool-proof solution for all 
Solaris versions it's getting too complex I guess. One thing that hasn't 
been mentioned yet are all the Unbundled packages, which don't come with 
the OS but for which patches exist as well. I'm thinking especially 
about the Veritas stuff, which gave me a lot of headache in the past. 
The use the same package name and version even for different OS 
releases, I don't assume that they separate them by architecture then.

> BUT, what I'm seeing, at least in 9 and 10, is that (at least with the 
> patches in the EIS bundles), if different architectures share a common 
> package version and package name, the patches that apply to the package 
> is updated for both architectures (I'm ignoring x86 here, since that has 
> only 1 arch type, so I don't foresee an issue....).  Therefore if I have 
> a particular version identifier for a package, and the patch patches 
> that package:version, it'll patch it, regardless of architecture.

I've done a manual check for all the affected packages and patches for 
Solaris 10 SPARC now, and came up with this list of problematic patches:

   119876-05: contains only FJSVvplu.u
   120011-14: contains only SUNWiopc.v
   127127-11: contains only SUNWiopc.v
   137137-09: contains only SUNWiopc.v

You could workaround those in your script easily, I guess.

When you look at Solaris 9, though, things get more complicated. The 
SUNWcar and SUNWkvm packages have the same version for sun4u and sun4m 
there, and there are loads of patches for those.

> So, my current question for you is, do you have any more info on the 
> problems you had?

The reports I got were mostly for 120011 and 127127 (see above). Even 
after I added a workaround for those, I received one or two reports for 
other patches. It was very hard to find out remotely whether they were 
actually partly installed patches (and pca was right) or whether they 
were false positives.

Martin.