[pca] PCA is 10!

[Rajiv Gunja]

Thanks Martin, your work has saved time, money and a lot of frustration. I
am sure a lot of Companies owe their efficiency to your work 10 years ago.
Thank you for contributing such an awesome tool/work to open source.

-GG


On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Diana Orrick <orrick at fsu.edu> wrote:

> 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
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**~~~~~~~
>
>
>
>
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