[pca] PCA is 10!

[Martin Paul]

PCA is 10!

Scrolling down on the PCA-News web page, at the very bottom, one finds 
this message: "2003/09/09: First version. Introducing PCA 1.0". So it's 
really 10 years now since I decided to make this script public, after 
I've been using it for some time internally. It had 208 lines at that time.

Only one day later I received the first e-mail with the subject "pca" 
from Andrew Brooks, which was a lot like the many messages I received in 
the next ten years:

First, he thanked for the useful script. Such comments from PCA users 
turned out to be my main motivation to maintain and refine PCA in the 
following years. So thanks to all of you who ever sent positive comments!

Second, he provided an idea (and included code) for some new function (a 
new option -H to output HTML) which I immediately decided *not* to 
include in the official version of PCA :-) In my answer I stated that I 
wanted to keep PCA as simple as possible, not depending on some URLs 
staying consistent on Sun's web page. I always liked Unix for its 
tradition of simple commands which can be used in pipes to achieve great 
things.

Soon other PCA users provided more and more input and I started to add 
new functions and options over the time, always weighing simplicity 
against usefulness. The option to download patches from Sun directly was 
probably one of the most useful, and the one which caused me most work 
in the last years. Sun (and later Oracle) turned the simple process of 
downloading a patch file via FTP into a complicated procedure with 
authentication, server redirects, dependencies on certain HTTP features 
etc. which I always had to follow closely to keep the download functions 
in PCA working. There were moments when I seriously thought about giving 
up on it.

While I knew that Sun engineers were using PCA themselves, and Sun never 
succeeded in providing a own, working patch administration tool (I would 
have been the first to switch, believe me!) they never officially 
acknowledged PCA, although it was recommended on some Sun websites and PDFs.

As I got a lot of e-mails in the meantime from admins asking about the 
usage of PCA and me answering the same questions over and over again, I 
created the PCA mailing lists (for those interested in numbers, I have 
4827 messages in my folder with private PCA communication, and 3139 
messages on the PCA mailing list - I definitely wrote more text than 
code). This helped a lot, as power users now answered the queries from 
beginners. I also had a lot more contact to the users of PCA and was 
fascinated in how many different ways and procedures it was being used. 
I also got in contact with Gerry Haskins and Don O'Malley from Sun, 
which made it a lot easier to sort out problems and to get information 
about the internals of Sun's patch creation and publication. Thanks to 
both of them for their help and patience!

With the appearance of Solaris 11 and its IPS system, traffic on the 
mailing list was reduced a lot. As PCA is not needed anymore on Solaris 
11, it is now being used mostly by experienced admins running Solaris 10 
who already know what they do. Personally, I also think that PCA is 
feature complete for quite some time now, and as (now) Oracle doesn't 
change their patch infrastructure anymore, new versions of PCA have been 
reduced to a minimum.

As far as I'm concerned, that's very welcome. While I still work with 
some Solaris systems, we're moving away from Solaris here slowly, due to 
the high prices of Oracle hardware and support. Of course I'll keep PCA 
working as long as somebody is still using it.

Finally, let me state that I'm pretty proud of what PCA turned out over 
the years - it has saved numerous sysadmins around the world uncountable 
hours of work and frustration. This compensates for all the time I 
invested, even if it was frustrating now and then when performing 
complicated tests to ensure PCA's analysis being correct or hunting for 
obscure bugs. Would I publish PCA 1.0 once again if I could go back to 
2003? I think so :-) If only for the amount of positive feedback I got 
over all the years.

Let me end with a quotation which is the basis of my work on PCA (and 
also in general):

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when 
there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)