Neil,
1) I understand that --minimal option is normally designed to be used with either missingr or missingrs operands. I've tested --minimal option with the "missing" operand and its having some effect, but it's not clear to me what it's doing? Is the behaviour of --minimal defined for use case that is omitting r and s?
No - the only patch group where it makes sense to use "--minimal" is "missingr". When using it e.g. with "missing", you will get a mixture of the most recent revision of all non-R patches and the minimal revision of all patches which are marked "R".
It doesn't help to use it with "missings" neither. Only the recommended patches are listed in patchdiag.xref in a way that can be used to find out the minimal revision. Patches marked "S" are sometimes misleading: The "S" does only mean that there is a security fix in any revision, not necessarily in the latest.
All that is not really a problem, though: With "--minimal -l missingr" you are supposed to get the equivalent of the latest Recommended Patch Set, which by definition contains all patches with security fixes for Solaris, which is probably what you're after anyway.
2) When using the --list or --listhtml options, I see that the header displays "List: missing" where "missing" is the operand. This is useful to the viewer of the list to see what operand was invoked. However, the option --minimal is not showing up in the header anywhere. So, If I am viewing the list I can't easily tell if the list is latest version or minimal. Should the designation of latest vs. minimal be visible in the list output? One idea is to change the "CR" in the header to say either "MR" or "LR" for Minimal Release, or Latest Release, respectively.
You usually can recognize it pretty easily when "--minimal" is used, because then the patch list will include some patches with "Obsoleted by ..." in the synopsis. But you're right, this could be more obvious. I've therefore added a change in the current development release (20120202-01) which modifies the "List:" header to look like that when "--minimal" is used:
List: missingr-minimal (227/139380)
3) I found a use case that leads to installing a patch which is immediately overwritten with a newer patch. This shouldn't break anything, but its less than optimal.
Is it possible that you were running "pca --minimal -l missingrs" here instead of using only the "missingr" patch group? This would pull in 147935 (which is S, but not R), while when used as intended only 146861 should show up.
If this doesn't explain the behaviour you see, please send me output from these commands on the affected system, so I can see what's going on:
uname -a > uname.out showrev -p > showrev.out pkginfo -x > pkginfo.out
I would have expected that PCA would check each patch being added to the list and remove the earlier ones from the list that are obsoleted by later patches to be installed. Maybe this checking is not being done? It would be a useful feature to speed up patching by not installing patches that should be skipped. This check can be automated using the information provided in the patchdiag.xref.
This check is done, which is why you usually don't see any obsolete patches in the list of "missing" patches. Only "--minimal" is different here.
Thanks for feedback, and let me know if something is still unclear. Martin.
