Don O'Malley wrote:
Basically, as soon as you start to use patches in the form of xxxxxx-yy with
PCA it will (and has to) assume that you take care of the dependencies and the
ordering yourself. If you have a self-maintained list of patches, it's
probably easiest to to try to install them on a test machine to get the
correct ordering.
Dumping all the patches in a single directory and using 'patchadd -M' may
help...
A recent idea for a service that Oracle could provide was to allow a customer to
submit a list of patch-IDs and revisions, and to get a copy of patchdiag.xref
which includes exactly these patches (plus required patches) in return.
This patchdiag.xref file could then be fed into PCA via its "xrefdir" option,
and it would allow the admin to verify any system against (and patch up to) this
very patchset.
This would not only be useful for such home-grown patch lists (which Oracle
doesn't like anyway), but also for patching prerequisites enforced by some
applications. E.g. Sun Studio, which always had a list of certain required
and/or recommended patches to be installed to make it work flawlessly. It's a
common FAQ as to how to verify such a list. If a patchdiag.xref with these
patches would be provided, again checking and patching would be a breeze.
Any spare time, Don? :)
Martin.
