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

[Martin Paul]

Thomas Gouverneur wrote:
>>    125369|05|Jan/01/70| | | |  ||||
>>    125547|01|Jan/01/70| | | |  ||||
> 
> For theses one I don't know again how to threat them... They are
> referenced as dependencies over some other patch but looks unresolvable
> (maybe they are internal release of theses patches....). The first
> release that I can see downloaded for 125369 is the -10.. How to handle
> that while generating the patchdiag.xref ?

I think that if a certain revision of patch is referenced in the official xref 
file, this very revision has existed at some time. If you don't have information 
about such a revision, I guess you can only use the next more recent one that 
does exist.

Looking at PCA's debug output with the sample patchdiag.xref, I see two more 
problems:

   119574|02|Jun/15/05| | |O| 
|10|sparc;|SUNWcsu:11.10.0,REV=2005.01.21.15.53;|Obsoleted by: 140860-01 SunOS 
5.10: su patch

The patch is obsoleted by 140860-01, which is not included in the xref. 
Basically, it would be enough to have 119574-02 to fulfill the dependency, but 
PCA won't use obsoleted patches, but follow the obsoletion chain until it finds 
a non-obsolete patch. So you could include 140860-01 in the xref file, but a 
better solution might be to include the information about 119574-02 from the 
time when it was not obsoleted yet. The more obsoletions one follows, the more 
dependencies will be pulled in. That's a rather basic question: Is it better to 
install only the minimum required revisions or should one try to get the most 
recent patches to fulfill dependencies?

Then there's a problem with 123839-01. It's required by 125503, but it's not 
included. Now when looking at the official xref file, one can see that it has 
been obsoleted by 126897-02, which *is* included in your xref. So actually the 
dependencies are fulfilled, but PCA can't know about that, because it only sees 
what's included in the short xref. I guess one will have to include that 
information in the generated xref as well.

I appreciate your work, but I'm somehow starting to doubt that this is really 
possible to generate a consistent xref file for any given set of patches (in a 
reasonable amount of time) ..

Martin.