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

[Ray Van Dolson]

Thanks for the reply Martin.

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 01:39:46AM -0700, Martin Paul wrote:
> 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 ..

Makes sense.

> 
> > 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.

Unfotunately, it appears, at least for me, that SUNWpython is the
actual full blown Python installation:

  # pkgchk -l -p /usr/bin/python
  Pathname: /usr/bin/python
  Type: symbolic link
  Source of link: python2.4
  Referenced by the following packages:
          SUNWPython     
  Current status: installed
  
Also a pkgchk -l SUNWpython | awk '/^Pathanem/ {print $2}' seems to
confirm this.  So I probably won't be able to remove it.

> 
> > 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?

That would see to make sense...

> 
> 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.

For the time being, I'll just install the patches knowing that they
don't really seem to add any data to my system or hurt anything.  Glad
to have a little additional understanding on the subject though.

Thanks again,
Ray