Sure - dryrun is exist it is as I remember "-a" option and it reports all what it discovered in great extent.
We can keep -t as long as you need for transition period. I thought patching from directory will actually be more useful for big company IT, because you may put all tested patches in one place and run patchadd pointing to it - and you do know what will be applied, all patches from this directory. And this is additional feature - everything else - patchlist file, command line etc, work as it work before, except no need for ordering. The question is which failed patch to report. Kshell script has exit first time it finds error and it is always first bad patch in the sequence. Recursive pdo algorithm do not have concept of sequential check - order for patches to be installed is what it determines also. I can exit with single error code easy, but which failed patch should I report, one of them incompatible, another one do not have requirement met? I can report one which first in the list provided to patchadd, but what about patching from directory? Which one to pick? I can imagine something like - "report status of this patch if we try to install it with that other patches". Like additional option specifying patch which you are interested in. Pdo is so fast that analyzing all patches to report only one will take no time and not a problem. But how apply this exit policy to the zones? It is not even linear but two-dimentional - zones x patches. Other question is now if I have rejected patches I will proceed with all applicable anyway and install them. Reason for this - we should not stop installation if on one zone one of the patches already installed by zone admin. So for this reason if there is a subset of patches applicable patchadd will apply it. What exit code should be if some patches installed and some did not? It is not a complete failure on my opinion. Thanks, Vassili. This message posted from opensolaris.org
