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Hi Martin/All,<br>
<br>
I wasn't expecting the new look Recommended Patchsets to hit the
shelves until this evening, so apologies for the delay in giving you a
heads-up on this.<br>
<br>
A couple of changes have been made to the old Recommended Patch
Clusters:<br>
1) We've rebranded the old Recommended "Patch Clusters" as Recommended
"Patchsets"<br>
2) We've added additional patches to the new patchset<br>
<br>
To go into a bit more detail...<br>
1) above is purely a cosmetic change to integrate with Oracle's
standard terminology. In Oracle they refer to what we previously called
"clusters" as "patchsets", hence the name change.<br>
<br>
In relation to 2). Yes, we have brought some additional patches into
the new Recommended Patchset. This is a result of months of work
research involving my team, Oracle Proactive Services and the Oracle
Technical Support Center. We have as a result made process changes in
generation of the patchsets.<br>
<br>
Previously, the criteria for including a patch in the Recommended
patchset was very cut and dry; a patch needed to address a Sun Alert
issue (i.e. Security, Data Loss or System Availability), or be required
by a patch that met that criteria in order to be included in the
Recommended patchset. While this was very effective at including
patches that avoid systems hitting critical issues, there was still a
gap... Often there are cases where a patch does not meet the Sun Alert
criteria, but yet provides a significant advantage to customers if
installed. An example of this might be a specific network driver that,
when installed, significantly improves network performance.<br>
In order to bridge this gap, the criteria for inclusion in the new
Recommended patchsets has been extended. Now Engineers working on the
"cold face" of customer issues in both the Oracle Technical Support
Center and in Oracle Proactive Services can leverage the experience
they gain from solving customer issues, by feeding back information on
specific patches that they recommend be included in the Recommended
Patchsets.<br>
While it may seem like we've added a large number of patches to the
cluster, please bear in mind that we have applied the new process all
the way back as far as S10 FCS, so many of the patches that have been
added to the Recommended Patchset will already be "freshbitted" in more
recent Solaris Updates.<br>
<br>
I hope all of this makes sense and you too see that this is as a really
big improvement in the Recommended Patchset.<br>
Gerry is on vacation at the moment, but he will be blogging about this
when he's back online.<br>
<br>
All thoughts/feedback/comments are welcome!<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
-Don<br>
<br>
<br>
Martin Paul wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4E0D920C.2030004@par.univie.ac.at" type="cite">A
PCA user pointed me at the README of the current "Recommended OS
Patchset". Besides a cosmetic change (the term "Patch Cluster" has been
replaced by "Patchset") there is this note:
<br>
<br>
The patch inclusion criteria have been extended to include patches
for
<br>
selected issues identified by Oracle Proactive Services and the
Oracle
<br>
Technical Support Center.
<br>
<br>
When comparing yesterday's and today's patchdiag.xref, I had already
noticed that there are hundreds of patches which are suddenly marked as
"R" (Recommended). I guess the above note explains this. So don't be
surprised when "pca -l missingr" suddenly shows a lot more patches than
yesterday.
<br>
<br>
Martin.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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<font face="Verdana, sans-serif" size="2"><b>Don O'Malley</b></font><br>
<font color="#666666" face="Verdana, sans-serif" size="2"> Manager,
Patch System Test<br>
Revenue Product Engineering | Solaris | Hardware <br>
East Point Business Park, Dublin 3, Ireland<br>
Phone: +353 1 8199764 <br>
Team Alias: <a href="mailto:rpe_patch_system_test_ww@oracle.com">rpe_patch_system_test_ww@oracle.com</a><br>
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