[pca] Obsolete Patches

[Alexander Skwar]

Deniz,

if you tell PCA to download & install eg. 144332-10, then it'll go and do
*exactly* that. It'll fetch 144332-10 and install it. In that case, when PCA
is told to do something about 144332-10, then it won't care about
obsolete-dness.

If you'd tell PCA to do patch 144332, then it would check for the latest
revision of that patch. If that's still 10, then it'll dl & install 144332-10.
But if it's been obsoleted by 144332-11 → 144332-12 → 144332-13,
then it would fetch 144332-13 and install that.

If you do not care about the exact revision of the to be installed patch,
then you should list 144332 in your patchlist file. As PCA would always
get the latest rev, you'd be fine.

What I'm right now not quite so clear about is, what happens, if 144332-10
is obsoleted by a different patch number, let's say 165232-01? I suppose
PCA would then install 165232-01, wouldn't it (ie. if "pca -i 14432" is run).

Regards,
Alexander

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 05:32, deniz rende <solariswiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Martin for the answers.
>
> I think I should be a little more clear on the subject. I've been working on
> various live upgrade projects and each time when I do a lu from an older
> update to the latest, sun provides list of patches that are needed to be
> installed on the system before doing a lu. For example it would say you need
> 123332-12 or higher or 144332-1 or higher (I made up the patch numbers but
> you get the idea).
>
> So I end up creating a file that contains anywhere between 10-20 patches
> which is not a problem. If I use pca to download and install the patches
> from this file, then sometimes pca tells me 123332-12 is obsoleted by
> 123312-13.
> In this case I am thinking either download the new patches by changing the
> file or just download the patches in the file no matter what. I was curious
> that instead of changing the file manually, can pca follow up on the
> obsoleted patches in the file. If it warns me for the obsolete patch, then
> could it download the newer one automatically?
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:51 AM, Martin Paul <martin at par.univie.ac.at>
> wrote:
>>
>> deniz rende wrote:
>>>
>>> Is there any way to tell pca to download the newer patches? or do I have
>>> to
>>> go back to my file and manually edit and change patch number x with patch
>>> number y and download them again?
>>
>> When you ask pca to list a certain patch (by specifying its ID), it will
>> list that patch even if it's obsoleted. So, yes, if you want a
>> self-maintained list of patches to install, you might have to check for
>> patch obsoletions and replace the affected patch in the list if needed. This
>> is not always a necessity, though. It's no problem to install obsoleted
>> patches; if you put a certain patch (or even revisions of a patch) on your
>> list, you might be interested in a certain fix. Often small patches are
>> obsoleted by huge kernel patches and you probably don't want automatic
>> obsoletion in such a case.
>>
>> Basically you have two options when patching:
>>
>> Install all patches. This is the paradigm that pca follows, that's why it
>> lists all missing patches by default. You can restrict this to all
>> "Security" patches, if needed.
>>
>> Install a certain, self-defined set of patches. pca will help you there,
>> too, but it's on you to come up with the list of patches you want/need.
>>
>> The advantage of the first method is that OS+all patches is a setup which
>> is tested by Sun, while it's impossible to test systems with all possible
>> combinations of installed and missing patches. Patches often have
>> side-effects which might cause problems then.
>>
>> Hope that helps,
>>
>> Martin.
>>
>
>



-- 
Alexander
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