[pca] confirming the validiting of a home grown patch_order file

[Martin Paul]

Gael Martinez wrote:
> What would be the fastest/cleanest way with pca to confirm/correct the
> right patching order for all patches placed in a flat file ?

Assuming that the patches are specified in patchID + revision format 
(xxxxxx-yy), PCA can't help you much here. The problem is that PCA uses the 
information from patchdiag.xref to build the patch dependency tree, but the file 
only contains information about the most recent revision of each patch.

patchadd knows about those dependencies because it uses the "patchinfo" file 
contained in the patch zip file. For PCA to do the same for a list of patches, 
it would have to download all patches first instead of relying on the xref file, 
which is kind of impractical.

Basically, as soon as you start to use patches in the form of xxxxxx-yy with PCA 
it will (and has to) assume that you take care of the dependencies and the 
ordering yourself. If you have a self-maintained list of patches, it's probably 
easiest to to try to install them on a test machine to get the correct ordering.

Martin.