Kyle McDonald writes: > Danek Duvall wrote: > > But you shouldn't be keying off of the build number, you should be keying > > off of the presence or absence of the feature you care about. There may or > > may not be an interface (or a sufficiently public one) for any given > > feature you might care about, but that's generally solvable by filing an > > RFE (in most cases, I'd imagine that providing such an interface wouldn't > > be a big issue, and a low amount of effort). > > > > > I disagree. Each Build or Update is a snapshot that is released, and > won't change.
That's not quite true. First of all, there are other patches that are released *between* Updates, which means that a given installation may well be at some intermediate point between Updates due to the installation of those patches. Secondly, there's no fundamental requirement that every bit from the "snapshot" is installed on any given system. Many things are optional components, and it's perfectly possible for a system installed from "Update X" that is known to contain "Feature Y" not to have any part of Y installed at all. Most importantly, we don't have any stable reference that maps version numbers of any sort to any kinds of features. If you're depending on these undocumented mappings, then you're depending on an implementation artifact, just as surely as if you'd picked a random undocumented symbol in /lib/libc.so.1 on which to hang your hat. Test for the feature desired, not the version. > Now that I think of it, I'm going to want to figure out a way that once > a machine is installed, I can disable IPS, so user/admins can't > mistakenly use it to change the config of the machine. *sigh* -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
