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

[Norman Lyon]

OK.  I have a request in with my SAM to get me in contact with the  
patch/testing team internal to Sun.  I'll let you know if I get  
anything usable from them (other than whitelist or static patch list  
with a custom file instead of patchdiag.xref).

Quoting Martin Paul <martin at par.univie.ac.at>:

> 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.
>
>