[pca] Can not exclude 144500-19!?

[Martin Paul]

Tate, Robert B wrote:
> 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.

I agree that the current behaviour is unexpected; to be honet, I had to take a 
close look myself to realise it. After looking at the code and thinking about 
alternatives, I'm still unsure about a "better" behaviour. A "--strict" option 
could be added, which would enforce strict ignoring, even if a patch is required 
by another one. Due to the recursive dependency checking, it would be hard to 
ignore the requiring patch, too, though. So it'll end up with patches in the 
list which will fail to install because of missing dependencies.

Anyway - the good thing is that such situations usually don't happen - the issue 
hasn't come up in the last years. This one is kind of special - normally a patch 
with ill effects is marked as "BAD" and an older revision is reinstated. Then 
PCA will show the last good revision, and everything is fine. This kernel patch 
doesn't have a previous revision, and it obsoleted a lot of other patches, which 
would have to be reinstated as well. Maybe the problem was deemed not to be 
serious enough, to rectify that amount of work.

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

It's used with PCA's "--safe" option. Before installing a patch, it uses pkgchk 
to see whether any of the files which come with the patch have local 
modifications. This is to warn you from e.g. /var/yp/Makefile or sendmail.cf 
being overwritten without notice. There isn't a 100% consistency in the pkgchk 
database, and the whitelist is used to ignore certain files in the check.

> 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).

Thanks!

Martin.