[pca] Solaris 10 Patches Now On Monthly Release Cadence

[Glen Gunselman]

I'm starting to think we may have completely missed the point.  I think perhaps the situation is just the opposite - Oracle Solaris is overly dependent on the customer.

I'm guessing that the primary reason for the delay in releasing patches is due to a huge reduction in their ability to create them.  I think most of the Solaris 10 expertise has probably moved on and been replaced with a new "sustaining" crew that has very little experience with Solaris 10.

I think the model was something like - Solaris 10 developers have idea(s), write code, test in their own little world, when satisfied code is shared with all developers, if/when none complain, code is released to customers.

I think there was an independent cycle for maintenance (now sustaining) that did not involve development.

If/when customer has a problem, we open SR and connect to person whose only Solaris knowledge is driven by the SR's they have worked.  If they don't find a canned answer using their tools (which are becoming more and more automated) they are lost.  If the customer pushes hard enough (to be fair - some do not require much pushing, but others are immovable) they can ask for help from the "back line".  The folks at back line do not have much in the way of real world Solaris experience but it does seem like they may have access to and can read the source code.

I get the impression that the developers are never involved with anything SR related and the support folks are almost totally dependent on the customer to drive their learning experience.

It appears to me that about the only sacred feature of any patch/update is that the automated testing it expected to complete for the revision of the code that is released to the customer -1. (I doubt that statement is very clear so let me restate - after the code has passed the automated testing there is another opportunity for change before it is released to the customer - after release I think it starts another round of automated testing.)

You can/will get more experienced support folks as you increase the priority/severity of an SR but I never use sev 1 unless I am willing to work 24x7 to resolve the problem.

Off course the above is just my guess work based on 8 years of working with Solaris, Sun hardware and trying to keep up with constantly changing listservs/bloggers.


The bottom line is that Solaris would be lost without constant feedback from the customer. 


(When I think about the above I always come back to the Vogons (HHGTTG) and their problems processing paper work (I wonder if I might feel better if I listened to some of Vogon poetry?))


It does repeatedly seem that the customer receives the short end of the stick but my experience suggests that Solaris just uses a short stick to begin with ...


Has everyone noticed:

1.	 There is another LU patch in the Oct update.
2.	 The latest KP patches 150400-02 and later have a problem with DISM (Doc ID 1582224.1)
3.	 I experienced a problem ludelete-ing a mounted BE (https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=224&mode=2&threadid=772598&aggregatorResults=T780147T782817T776730T775983T772773T780317T772598T774105T779199T777827&sourceCommunityId=209&sourcePortletId=370&doPagination=true&pagedAggregatorPageNo=1&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fcommunities.oracle.com%2Fportal%2Fserver.pt%3Fopen%3Dspace%26name%3DCommunityPage%26id%3D1%26psname%3DOpener%26psid%3D0%26cached%3Dtrue%26in_hi_userid%3D104789%26control%3DSetCommunity%26PageID%3D0%26CommunityID%3D209%26&Portlet=My%20Discussions&PrevPage=Communities-Discussions)
4.	 I experienced a problem a patch 121657-54 (installed using pca -R) to an new BE altering the running system (https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=224&mode=2&threadid=772773&aggregatorResults=T781893T772773T749481T740056T704511T702077T700381T661683T598806T598705&sourceCommunityId=561&sourcePortletId=268&doPagination=true&pagedAggregatorPageNo=1&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fcommunities.oracle.com%2Fportal%2Fserver.pt%3Fopen%3Dspace%26name%3DCommunityPage%26id%3D8%26cached%3Dtrue%26in_hi_userid%3D104789%26control%3DSetCommunity%26PageID%3D0%26CommunityID%3D561%26&Portlet=All%20Community%20Discussions&PrevPage=Communities-CommunityHome)

Have a good day,
GlenG

-----Original Message-----
From: pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at [mailto:pca-bounces at lists.univie.ac.at] On Behalf Of lastmiles .
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 8:17 AM
To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion
Subject: Re: [pca] Solaris 10 Patches Now On Monthly Release Cadence

The Oracle Zone : a place where the customer means nothing.  You're in it.