[pca] PCA is 10!

[Laurent Blume]

Happy Birthday PCA, and Martin, thanks for all the time saved! My only 
regret: not having tried it earlier :-)

One reason that for me, Solaris 11 feels like a regression, is just 
that: no pca there.

Laurent

On 09/09/13 13:08, Martin Paul wrote:
> PCA is 10!
>
> Scrolling down on the PCA-News web page, at the very bottom, one finds
> this message: "2003/09/09: First version. Introducing PCA 1.0". So it's
> really 10 years now since I decided to make this script public, after
> I've been using it for some time internally. It had 208 lines at that time.
>
> Only one day later I received the first e-mail with the subject "pca"
> from Andrew Brooks, which was a lot like the many messages I received in
> the next ten years:
>
> First, he thanked for the useful script. Such comments from PCA users
> turned out to be my main motivation to maintain and refine PCA in the
> following years. So thanks to all of you who ever sent positive comments!
>
> Second, he provided an idea (and included code) for some new function (a
> new option -H to output HTML) which I immediately decided *not* to
> include in the official version of PCA :-) In my answer I stated that I
> wanted to keep PCA as simple as possible, not depending on some URLs
> staying consistent on Sun's web page. I always liked Unix for its
> tradition of simple commands which can be used in pipes to achieve great
> things.
>
> Soon other PCA users provided more and more input and I started to add
> new functions and options over the time, always weighing simplicity
> against usefulness. The option to download patches from Sun directly was
> probably one of the most useful, and the one which caused me most work
> in the last years. Sun (and later Oracle) turned the simple process of
> downloading a patch file via FTP into a complicated procedure with
> authentication, server redirects, dependencies on certain HTTP features
> etc. which I always had to follow closely to keep the download functions
> in PCA working. There were moments when I seriously thought about giving
> up on it.
>
> While I knew that Sun engineers were using PCA themselves, and Sun never
> succeeded in providing a own, working patch administration tool (I would
> have been the first to switch, believe me!) they never officially
> acknowledged PCA, although it was recommended on some Sun websites and
> PDFs.
>
> As I got a lot of e-mails in the meantime from admins asking about the
> usage of PCA and me answering the same questions over and over again, I
> created the PCA mailing lists (for those interested in numbers, I have
> 4827 messages in my folder with private PCA communication, and 3139
> messages on the PCA mailing list - I definitely wrote more text than
> code). This helped a lot, as power users now answered the queries from
> beginners. I also had a lot more contact to the users of PCA and was
> fascinated in how many different ways and procedures it was being used.
> I also got in contact with Gerry Haskins and Don O'Malley from Sun,
> which made it a lot easier to sort out problems and to get information
> about the internals of Sun's patch creation and publication. Thanks to
> both of them for their help and patience!
>
> With the appearance of Solaris 11 and its IPS system, traffic on the
> mailing list was reduced a lot. As PCA is not needed anymore on Solaris
> 11, it is now being used mostly by experienced admins running Solaris 10
> who already know what they do. Personally, I also think that PCA is
> feature complete for quite some time now, and as (now) Oracle doesn't
> change their patch infrastructure anymore, new versions of PCA have been
> reduced to a minimum.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, that's very welcome. While I still work with
> some Solaris systems, we're moving away from Solaris here slowly, due to
> the high prices of Oracle hardware and support. Of course I'll keep PCA
> working as long as somebody is still using it.
>
> Finally, let me state that I'm pretty proud of what PCA turned out over
> the years - it has saved numerous sysadmins around the world uncountable
> hours of work and frustration. This compensates for all the time I
> invested, even if it was frustrating now and then when performing
> complicated tests to ensure PCA's analysis being correct or hunting for
> obscure bugs. Would I publish PCA 1.0 once again if I could go back to
> 2003? I think so :-) If only for the amount of positive feedback I got
> over all the years.
>
> Let me end with a quotation which is the basis of my work on PCA (and
> also in general):
>
> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
> there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)