Right now patchadd has new dependency check implemented on C. It is pdo which was introduced for zone support. It is now doing real multipatching and analyses all provided patches together. In result there is no ordering necessary as well as you may point to directory without listing patches.
It analyses requested set of patches and approve some of them to install as well as reject some of them. If there is no "fatal rejection" like global patch inconsistent with one of zone, then it will proceed with all approved patches installation skipping rejected. Old kshell solution instead of dealing with set of patches sequentially call itself to patches from list one by one. And in case of failure - exit with undocumented return code. In result pdo produces list of results for each patch is approved or not as well as explanation why, but patchadd produce one exit code - because it is always handle one patch at a time. As you may see it is impossible to have single return code for pdo and it was decided that right way to work with it - analyses output and eventually we will make this output XML. Pdo generates a lot of output about check results. This of course mean that all tools which use patchad and relied on undocumented exit codes will need to be now modified. So transition period is nessesary for this tools and this is why -t option, which means "transition" was introduced. In general it skips all C-dependancy check and just pass parameters to patchadd.ksh . We should remove -t option in time. vassun This message posted from opensolaris.org
