Person who made the changes is me and I am convinced that it is probably few hundreds times faster then dependency check done by shell script, for absolutely obvious reasons - it is all over this introduction if you read it. Edna make some kind of performance check and it take pdo 2 sec to do check out of about hour of patching. But it is easy to convince anyone - just run patchadd with or without -t on bug number of patches with dependencies.
And this is not only dependency check but also sorting patches in the list or in the directory. If you really like to get this benefit of fast dependency check you may consider to parse pdo output to see what happen which patches were denied to patch and why. Of course it will be better to provide some interface for 3rd party tools. But install group very buzy with different things. "-t" option was introduced for transition to make possible to use patching with old tools, but it is just an old slow patchadd - no fast check, no smart sorting etc... It was meant to go away initially. vassun. This message posted from opensolaris.org
