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PCA: The future of Solaris patching ??

Here is another post about patching Sun Solaris systems.

Even though I personally think that the features provided by smpatch(1M) are an improvement compared to the previous patch utilities like patchdiag, patchcheck and patchpro there's always room for improvement.
So i started snooping around to find a utility called PCA which stands for Patch Check Advanced.
PCA is only 2 files, a small perl script (around 1500 lines of code) and a manpage.
Here's a quote from the pca author's website to give you an impression about pca's design:

"A lot of care is taken to guarantee that pca doesn't omit patches which might apply to a system. This is the most important design principle. I'm manually checking that it's fulfilled on a daily basis".

You can run pca without root privileges to see which patches can be applied to your system.
When being run without any arguments, pca produces a nice and clean overview of the required patches (after having analyzed the dependencies) which are applicable for your system and it shows this overview in the correct order of installation.
PCA makes it real easy to list the contents of a patch's README file as well which i find to be tremendously usefull.

I could sum up all the options pca is currently offering but a link to the PCA website is much more appropriate :)

I've been using pca for about a week now so i'm aware that's not a really long time but what i've seen so far, i'm already impressed by pca's capabilities.

posted by Marco @ 13:06