Peter Tribble wrote: > Upgrading means testing and requalifying all my applications. At > least under Solaris, patching never has. Under the current patching > scheme, it's possible to get a fix for an individual bug; upgrading the > whole package involves many more changes and significantly > increasing the risk to the end user. >
This imparts a much greater weight to the mechanism of software change than is appropriate. A patch can change every portion of a package, or only a misspelling in a comment in an include file. There is no semantic difference between a patch and upgrade; both apply change to the system. Whether or not you need to requal all your applications depends on your sense of paranoia and consequences of things going wrong. As to a patch fixing a single bug, if you're running S10FCS and you need to get a bug fix that appeared in S10 U4, you're not applying a single fixed binary to S10 FCS; you'll be apply that patch - plus all its dependencies, which may likely mean a new KU, newboot, zfw, trusted, and all the other projects that have integrated into the S10 updates. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
