On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:53 AM, Philip Brown<[email protected]> wrote: > A long while ago, I brought up the unpopular point, that the real problem > with patching, is not "SVR4 patching is broken", but "Sun's patching teams > make poor choices about how to structure patches(and group packages)". > > I was basically shouted down, for daring to criticize Sun, or the direction > IPS was heading in. > > No one bothered to confirm or deny whether what I said, was *true* or not. > > Here's some hard data to prove the truth of the point I was trying to make. > > My reason in bringing this up again, in this forum, is to ask the IPS team > how they plan to make IPS magically fix this sort of problem, when it is > caused by the sun packaging/patch teams' PROCESSES, not lack of technology. > > My guess is the reply will be , "disk space is cheap, so just do full > installs everywhere". But I'll state ahead of time that in my opinion, this > is not an appropriate response to customers > > * * * * * * * > > The real-life problem: > (and note that, being real-life, the problem description is somewhat LONG > :-) > > > I'm looking to patch a bunch of solaris 10 sparc servers. > They have a "server oriented install" set of packages. To give some idea of > the scope of the install: > > # pkginfo|grep SUNW|wc -l > 592 > # (whereas a full install, would have 2000+ packages) > > They have SUNWxim installed. Even though a local X server is not installed. > > Because, being a university, our customers may very well wish to run UTF-8 > locales for some programs, remotely. > That means we have things like > system SUNWeuxwe UTF-8 X Window Environment > installed. Which require SUNWxim. > > (I also vaguely recall that some java things complain without SUNWxim > installed, but i could be mistaken) > > So far so good.. but now I want to install a recommended patch cluster. > Which includes patch 121975-01 > > > patching 121975-01 FAILS. Because it depends on 121975-01. > patch 121975-01 fails, because SUNWdtdte is not installed. > > But we dont WANT SUNWdtdte installed! That includes stuff like dtlogin, and > all kinds of other cruft that dont belong on our servers! > > > SUNWxim does not depend on SUNWdtdte. Therefore, a patch for SUNWxim, has no > business pulling in an implied dependancy on SUNWdtdte either. > But it does, and the patch fails without it. > > That fairly tightly fits my own personal definition of > "broken patch creation policies/procedures". > > So, how is switching to the "better technology" of IPS, going to solve this > problem of broken patch creation process inside of Sun?
Hey Phil: Very easy! As no "--no-deps" is "supported", your scenario would not even be possible anymore, not at all. That's the solution (really). -- Martin _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
