[pca] PCA does not handle reapplying patches that need to be reapplied

[Martin Paul]

Brian,

> Am I misunderstanding how this should be working?  Is this  a known issue? 

It's a long-standing known issue. Here's my last summary on that issue 
from an earlier posting:

I have put quite some time into this issue in the past. At first I came 
up with a script to identify such "partly installed patches" and it 
seemed to work fine. I built the functionality into pca, but soon 
discovered that it caused problems. It would find some false positives 
(e.g reinstall kernel patches which don't need a reinstall), and it 
fails to identify some special cases, especially with pre-installed patches.

At the end I found out (and it was confirmed by a Sun engineer) that 
there just isn't enough information in the system to determine which 
patches need to be reinstalled.

Sun's official line (it's mentioned in some InfoDoc) is that *all* 
patches have to be reinstalled as soon as a package is added to a system 
which already had patches installed. I wouldn't do that, as it might 
cause more issues than it solves.

I really recommend deciding on an install cluster and stick to that. If 
there are more packages than you need, ignore that. Sun only tests 
patches on official clusters, too, and you might see failing patch 
installs when you later add or remove packages. If you *must* add a 
package, grep for the package name+version through patchdiag.xref and 
identify which patches have to be re-installed manually.

I'm not happy about all that either, but we're talking about a package 
system which is far from perfect, and it's hard to put something perfect 
onto such a basis :) Hope you are not too disappointed ..

Martin.