[pca] Changes in Recommended OS Cluster

[Dominique Frise]

Hello,

Pour info. explications plus officielles sur le changement dans la 
gestion des patchs Oracle.

Dominique

On 07/ 1/11 04:38 PM, Don O'Malley wrote:
> Hi Martin/All,
>
> I wasn't expecting the new look Recommended Patchsets to hit the shelves
> until this evening, so apologies for the delay in giving you a heads-up
> on this.
>
> A couple of changes have been made to the old Recommended Patch Clusters:
> 1) We've rebranded the old Recommended "Patch Clusters" as Recommended
> "Patchsets"
> 2) We've added additional patches to the new patchset
>
> To go into a bit more detail...
> 1) above is purely a cosmetic change to integrate with Oracle's standard
> terminology. In Oracle they refer to what we previously called
> "clusters" as "patchsets", hence the name change.
>
> In relation to 2). Yes, we have brought some additional patches into the
> new Recommended Patchset. This is a result of months of work research
> involving my team, Oracle Proactive Services and the Oracle Technical
> Support Center. We have as a result made process changes in generation
> of the patchsets.
>
> Previously, the criteria for including a patch in the Recommended
> patchset was very cut and dry; a patch needed to address a Sun Alert
> issue (i.e. Security, Data Loss or System Availability), or be required
> by a patch that met that criteria in order to be included in the
> Recommended patchset. While this was very effective at including patches
> that avoid systems hitting critical issues, there was still a gap...
> Often there are cases where a patch does not meet the Sun Alert
> criteria, but yet provides a significant advantage to customers if
> installed. An example of this might be a specific network driver that,
> when installed, significantly improves network performance.
> In order to bridge this gap, the criteria for inclusion in the new
> Recommended patchsets has been extended. Now Engineers working on the
> "cold face" of customer issues in both the Oracle Technical Support
> Center and in Oracle Proactive Services can leverage the experience they
> gain from solving customer issues, by feeding back information on
> specific patches that they recommend be included in the Recommended
> Patchsets.
> While it may seem like we've added a large number of patches to the
> cluster, please bear in mind that we have applied the new process all
> the way back as far as S10 FCS, so many of the patches that have been
> added to the Recommended Patchset will already be "freshbitted" in more
> recent Solaris Updates.
>
> I hope all of this makes sense and you too see that this is as a really
> big improvement in the Recommended Patchset.
> Gerry is on vacation at the moment, but he will be blogging about this
> when he's back online.
>
> All thoughts/feedback/comments are welcome!
>
> Best,
> -Don
>
>
> Martin Paul wrote:
>> A PCA user pointed me at the README of the current "Recommended OS
>> Patchset". Besides a cosmetic change (the term "Patch Cluster" has
>> been replaced by "Patchset") there is this note:
>>
>> The patch inclusion criteria have been extended to include patches for
>> selected issues identified by Oracle Proactive Services and the Oracle
>> Technical Support Center.
>>
>> When comparing yesterday's and today's patchdiag.xref, I had already
>> noticed that there are hundreds of patches which are suddenly marked
>> as "R" (Recommended). I guess the above note explains this. So don't
>> be surprised when "pca -l missingr" suddenly shows a lot more patches
>> than yesterday.
>>
>> Martin.
>>
>
> --
> <http://www.oracle.com/>
> *Don O'Malley*
> Manager, Patch System Test
> Revenue Product Engineering | Solaris | Hardware
> East Point Business Park, Dublin 3, Ireland
> Phone: +353 1 8199764
> Team Alias: rpe_patch_system_test_ww at oracle.com
> <mailto:rpe_patch_system_test_ww at oracle.com>