[pca] Slightly OT -- trying to figure out why I need a patch

[Martin Paul]

Ray,

> Have a fairly minimal Solaris 10 x86_64 install.  pca -l missingrs is
> reporting that these two patches are required (among others of course):
> 
> 119901 06 < 08 RS-  43 GNOME 2.6.0_x86: Gnome libtiff - library for reading and writing T
> 122213 32 < 33 RS- 107 GNOME 2.6.0_x86: GNOME Desktop Patch
> 
> However, there are no GNOME packages installed on the system:
> 
>   pkgchk -l -P gnome | grep Pathname

The next step in analyzing an issue like that would be to look at the 
entries for 119901-08 and 122213-33 in the patchdiag.xref file. There 
you'd see that both of them include other packages besides SUNWgnome-*:

   119901: SUNWPython, SUNWTiff, SUNWTiff-devel
   122213: SUNWPython

So I guess you do have SUNWPython installed on your system, and this 
makes pca show the two patches as missing ..

> Oddly enough, if I check with showrev:
> 
> # showrev -p | egrep "119901|122213"
> Patch: 119901-06 Obsoletes: 121098-01 Requires:  Incompatibles:  Packages: SUNWPython
> Patch: 122213-32 Obsoletes: 119367-05, 119371-10, 119413-08, 119543-06, 119893-01, 119909-02, 120134-04, 120136-03, 120297-01 Requires:  Incompatibles:  Packages: SUNWPython

.. and here's the confirmation. It's not the preinstalled, older 
revisions of the patches which make show up the patches as missing, but 
the fact that you have SUNWPython installed.

The straight-forward solution: Remove the SUNWPython package, unless you 
need it. Judging from the .clustertoc file, this package is only 
required with GNOME, so if you don't need it for some own Python 
scripts, it should be no problem to remove it. pca will not show the 
patches anymore.

> I stumbled across these two bugs via the README that mention the issue:
> 
>   http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do;jsessionid=5c3a9026cabfcffffffffb60c376f8c393ed?bug_id=6691595
>   http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do;jsessionid=bee10325bfc4304962c7552db19c?bug_id=6681251

It seems as if the inclusion of SUNWPython in these patches is a bug, 
indeed. After looking at the patch report, and the contents of the patch 
zip files, I really think that installing these patches on a system 
without SUNWgnome-*, the patch install is a no-op. I have no idea why 
SUNWPython hasn't been removed from current revisions of the patches. 
Maybe Don can shed some light on that?

I could resolve this in pca, by removing SUNWPython from the package 
list for these patches before the analysis step, pretending that 
SUNWPython is not included at all, but if you can solve the issue by 
removing SUNWPython, I'd prefer not doing that.

> Also, I notice that a pkginfo -l SUNWPython has GNOME2 listed under
> Category, which seems odd.

IMO, python has been included with Solaris because it was required for 
Gnome, that's why it's labelled like that. Putting it into the "system" 
or "application" category might make more sense, though, as it's of good 
use outside of Gnome as well.

hth,

Martin.