[pca] PCA is 10!

[Diana Orrick]

Congratulations!!

Many thanks for the incredible body of work that is PCA.



On 9/9/2013 7:08 AM, 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)
>
>

-- 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Diana Mayer Orrick
Assistant Director, Unix Systems
Infrastructure and Operations Support
Information Technology Services
The Florida State University
orrick at fsu.edu - (850) 645-8009
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~