[pca] synchronization between "recommended patch cluster" and patchdiag.xref?

[Martin Paul]

Paul B. Henson wrote:
> On a currently open support request, Sun is complaining that the patches on
> our server are way out of date and we should install the recommended patch
> cluster.
> ...
> A number of the patches they indicate should be installed do not appear to
> be marked as recommended in the patchdiag.xref (my current one is dated
> Oct/14/09), including for example:
> 
>> ALERT: 140789 missing (current -01): SunOS 5.10_x86: nfsd, nfs4cbd, lockd patch
>> ALERT: 140388 missing (current -01): SunOS 5.10_x86: statd patch
>> ALERT: 141933 missing (current -02): SunOS 5.10_x86: unshare patch

Funny. When looking at the list of patches included in the current 
"Solaris 10 x86 Recommended Patch Cluster" (Oct 14 2009) you'll see that 
none of these patches are included in the cluster:

   http://sunsolve.sun.com/pdownload.do?target=10_x86_Recommended.README

So installing the cluster won't make any difference, as far as these 
patches are concerned.

> Has anyone compared the contents of the recommended patch cluster to the
> patchdiag file lately?

Me, now :) I made two lists for Solaris 10 SPARC, one of them the sorted 
list of included patches taken from the cluster README, the other one 
created with:

   pca --noheader -l allr --format '%p-%c  %y' | sort

I compared them, and after sorting out those which don't apply to my 
system, and those which were obsoleted recently (it's not the best time 
to do the comparison, as with U8 a lot of patches are obsoleted), I 
concluded that the lists are essentially the same. So for this example, 
installing the "missingr" patches with pca will give you the same patch 
state as installing the Recommended Patch Cluster.

 > I recall reading in the past occurrences where they were not the same.

Yes, that's right. Actually, I'm not sure whether it's really guaranteed 
that the patches with an "R" flag in patchdiag.xref are the same set as 
those included in the Recommended Patch Clusters. Of course this would 
make a lot of sense ..

Martin.