Martin Paul wrote:
The reaons (or at least one reason) for differing checksums is that Sun/Oracle sometimes changes a patch zip file's contents after first publishing, like updating README files. As far as I know any functional change would trigger a new revision.
A small addendum: I used a second script to compare the contents of my local copy with the current ZIP file from Oracle's server of about 200 patches with differing checksums, to verify this statement. In none of them a file other than "README.<patch-id>" or "LEGAL_LICENSE.TXT" has changed.
So it's safe to assume that there will be no functional changes between different copies of the same patch. As for READMEs - if you run a pca proxy, you can use "pca --force --readme <patch-ID>" to instruct the proxy to always download the current README from Oracle, instead of using a local copy in the cache.
Martin.
