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

[Martin Paul]

Don O'Malley wrote:
>> 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.
> Dumping all the patches in a single directory and using 'patchadd -M' may help...

A recent idea for a service that Oracle could provide was to allow a customer to 
submit a list of patch-IDs and revisions, and to get a copy of patchdiag.xref 
which includes exactly these patches (plus required patches) in return.

This patchdiag.xref file could then be fed into PCA via its "xrefdir" option, 
and it would allow the admin to verify any system against (and patch up to) this 
very patchset.

This would not only be useful for such home-grown patch lists (which Oracle 
doesn't like anyway), but also for patching prerequisites enforced by some 
applications. E.g. Sun Studio, which always had a list of certain required 
and/or recommended patches to be installed to make it work flawlessly. It's a 
common FAQ as to how to verify such a list. If a patchdiag.xref with these 
patches would be provided, again checking and patching would be a breeze.

Any spare time, Don? :)

Martin.