[pca] Option --minimal questions

[Brookins, Neil (Philadelphia)]

1) Thank you for clarifying the use of --minimal. I now understand that its only intended to be used with missingr.  For the benefit of other confused people like me, would it make sense for pca to display a warning when --minimal is used with any other combination of operand?  I bet I'm not the only one who has done this.

2) Changing the "List:" header, when using --minimal is a wonderful idea. Thanks!

3) I was indeed using --minimal  with the missingrs operand. Now that I've learned this is not supported, I withdraw my question.

Neil G. Brookins
Identity and Authentication Solutions - IT Global Solutions
Towers Watson
1500 Market Street | Philadelphia, PA 19102
Phone: +1 215 246 6046
neil.brookins at towerswatson.com

-----Original Message-----
From: pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at] On Behalf Of Martin Paul
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 6:09 AM
To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion
Subject: Re: [pca] Option --minimal questions

Neil,

> 1) I understand that --minimal option is normally designed to be used with either missingr or missingrs operands.
> I've tested --minimal option with the "missing" operand and its having some effect, but it's not clear to me what it's doing?
> Is the behaviour of --minimal defined for use case that is omitting  r and s?

No - the only patch group where it makes sense to use "--minimal" is "missingr". 
When using it e.g. with "missing", you will get a mixture of the most recent 
revision of all non-R patches and the minimal revision of all patches which are 
marked "R".

It doesn't help to use it with "missings" neither. Only the recommended patches 
are listed in patchdiag.xref in a way that can be used to find out the minimal 
revision. Patches marked "S" are sometimes misleading: The "S" does only mean 
that there is a security fix in any revision, not necessarily in the latest.

All that is not really a problem, though: With "--minimal -l missingr" you are 
supposed to get the equivalent of the latest Recommended Patch Set, which by 
definition contains all patches with security fixes for Solaris, which is 
probably what you're after anyway.

> 2) When using the --list or --listhtml options, I see that the header displays "List: missing" where "missing" is the operand. This is useful to the viewer of the list to see what operand was invoked. However, the option --minimal is not showing up in the header anywhere. So, If I am viewing the list I can't easily tell if the list is latest version or minimal. Should the designation of latest vs. minimal be visible in the list output? One idea is to change the "CR" in the header to say either "MR" or "LR" for Minimal Release, or Latest Release, respectively.

You usually can recognize it pretty easily when "--minimal" is used, because 
then the patch list will include some patches with "Obsoleted by ..." in the 
synopsis. But you're right, this could be more obvious. I've therefore added a 
change in the current development release (20120202-01) which modifies the 
"List:" header to look like that when "--minimal" is used:

   List: missingr-minimal (227/139380)

> 3) I found a use case that leads to installing a patch which is immediately overwritten with a newer patch. This shouldn't break anything, but its less than optimal.

Is it possible that you were running "pca --minimal -l missingrs" here instead 
of using only the "missingr" patch group? This would pull in 147935 (which is S, 
but not R), while when used as intended only 146861 should show up.

If this doesn't explain the behaviour you see, please send me output from these 
commands on the affected system, so I can see what's going on:

   uname -a > uname.out
   showrev -p > showrev.out
   pkginfo -x > pkginfo.out

> I would have expected that PCA would check each patch being added to the list and remove the earlier ones from the list that are obsoleted by later patches to be installed. Maybe this checking is not being done? It would be a useful feature to speed up patching by not installing patches that should be skipped.  This check can be automated using the information provided in the patchdiag.xref.

This check is done, which is why you usually don't see any obsolete patches in 
the list of "missing" patches. Only "--minimal" is different here.

Thanks for feedback, and let me know if something is still unclear.

Martin.


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