[pca] Support Levels

[Martin Paul]

Recently Mike Brown provided a document ID (1269292.1, available on My Oracle 
Support) which explains the correlation between Support Contracts, Support 
Levels and Patches.

In short, a certain Support Level is required to access any patch. A certain 
type of Support Contract includes one or more Support Levels. Only if these 
match, one is allowed to download a patch. This explains some effects seen 
recently, e.g. Sun Studio Patches (require Support Level "Software") not being 
available for customers with a "Premier Support for Operating Systems" (Support 
Level "Operating System", formerly known as "Basic Solaris Subscription" or 
similar).

In the current development release of PCA (20101220-01) I added two things:

(1) A new command line option "--supplevel", which contacts My Oracle Support 
and shows the Support Levels of a given MOS Account. Example:

   $ pca --user user at domain.org --passwd secret --supplevel
   Determining MOS Support Levels

   OS: Solaris patches and updates
   PUB: Oracle Open Office/StarOffice and patch utilities
   $

(2) A new section called SUPPORT LEVELS in PCA's documentation which explains 
the concept and which includes a table of possible Support Levels and Support 
Contract Coverage. See "pca --man" or:

   http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/usaged.html#support_levels

Much of the information has been taken from the above mentioned Knowledge Article.

PCA will still not be able to tell you which patches are accessible when using a 
certain MOS Account without actually trying to download it. For that to work, 
Oracle would have to include a new column in patchdiag.xref, specifying the 
required Support Level to download a patch.

Martin.