[rescue] Question on upgrading Solaris 10 3/05 to latest

[D.A. Muran-de Assereto]

Quoting Jonathan Katz <jon at jonworld.com>:

> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:06 PM, D.A. Muran-de Assereto
> <dmuran at tuad.org> wrote:
>> According to a buddy of mine who is a pretty high-powered Sun engineer,
>> Sun's official posture is that there is no difference between a system
that
>> has been patched to the latest rev or one that is installed from the
latest
>> rev. I've done a little poking around, but I cannot confirm or deny this
>> from personal experience; I know that a lot of stuff that doesn't count as
a
>> bugfix is getting changed or added in some of the systems I've looked at,
>> and it's causing some maintenance issues.
>
> Starting with 9? (I know for sure 10) it's different and that patches
> can add functionality. With 8 you had to re-install to get some
> functionality. I remember living through it but I forget what it is
> (maybe it was DR for Exx00 systems?) I know with 10 you could add ZFS
> (or was it Zones?) through a series of patches for your 10-GA system.
>
> The real problem would be if you installed a minimized install, went
> to install some patches that promised functionality, but those patches
> relied upon rudimentary/stub packages that were never originally
> installed... therefore the patch won't apply.
>

Agreed, I think Sun's position is also predicated on the use of
contract patches as well.

<rant> They have really broken the patch QA lately, especially for the
Opteron/x86 systems. I've installed at least two on testbed systems
that needed to be immediately backed out because they broke the system
badly. This has happened both times because smpatch will merrily tell
you about patches that require contract patched in order to work
right, and will then install the dependent patches without the
required contract patch.
</rant>

Dave


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Sapere Aude!