[pca] EXTERNAL: Re: Can not exclude 144500-19!?

[Tate, Robert B]

Thank you! I missed that. I would argue that is should ignore it as requested and then show that the others were ignored also when they were done. Or a separate option to Force the ignore anyway. I see the reason for not doing it that way also, but the only problem with that is that (in this case) we end up with an unbootable system.

Your work around to ignore all is what I will try to use now. 

I did see a 'whitelist' referred to in the update logs. What is that used for?

This is a awesome program and has saved my tail on a bunch of systems when Oracle stopped supporting smpatch on Sol 8 and 9 systems (I still have a few left).


Tate, R B

-----Original Message-----
From: pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at] On Behalf Of Martin Paul
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 5:49 AM
To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion
Subject: EXTERNAL: Re: [pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?

Tate, Robert B wrote:
> I don't know why there is a whitelist at all or why it overrides the wishes of the user.
> I will look to see if I can find an older version that works. I hadn't thought of that.

It's not the whitelist which causes this, so an older version of PCA won't help 
here.

Actually, this behaviour is documented:

   --ignore=WHAT
       Ignore certain patches. The patch will not be listed,
       downloaded or installed unless it is required by another patch.
                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The problem here is that there are other patches which do require 144500. In the 
case of such a patch dependency, PCA ignores the various options which would 
remove a required patch from the list - this affects "ignore", "stop", 
"minage/maxage", "pattern" and the "r/s" operand postfixes.

One can argue whether this is expected behaviour, but acting differently in this 
case would open up a lot more questions:

If PCA would ignore (ie. not list) 144500 in this example, should it still list 
the patches which require it, even if they will then fail to install? Or should 
these patches be silently ignored as well?

What if a required patch doesn't match "pattern", or if a required patch isn't 
marked 'R' and "pca -l missingr" is used - should these be stricyly ignored as 
well, or are these criteria less hard than "ignore"?

It's not that I'm not open to implement this in a different way, I just think 
that it's hard to find a solution which fits all.

Anyway - in this example and with PCA as it is, one option is to ignore all 
patches which require 144500 as well. With "pca --debug" that's easy to find 
out. I ended up with:

   pca --ignore 144500 --ignore 143643 --ignore 147151 --ignore 147153 \
       --ignore 147159 --ignore 147161 --ignore 147434 --ignore 147436 \
       --ignore 147440

Or you use a modified copy of patchdiag.xref, from which you remove the line for 
144500. Without any information about 144500, PCA will not list it.

Martin.