[pca] Connecting different, non-obsolete patches

[Dražen Kačar]

Hello.

Today I needed a program which would take a list of patches and check if
they are installed on the OS, taking into account that there might be
installed patches which obsolete some from the initial list.

I needed that to check if I had all prerequisites for Live Upgrade, but
the same thing is needed for other software, like LDOM packages, Oracle,
etc.

I couldn't find software which can do this, so I started writing my own. I
got stuck with Solaris 10 kernel patches. There are a number of kernel
patches in patchdiag.xref which are neither obsolete nor bad, for example:

118833-36
120011-14
127127-11
139555-08

etc.

How does PCA decide that they are actually the same patch? The only
thing that comes to my mind is to check whether synopsys from
patchdiag.xref (case insensitive compare, possibly with trimming extra
spaces) is the same and then to check the release date to put them into
sensible order. But that's too heuristic for my liking.

Is there a better way?

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