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

[Jonathan Katz]

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.

My $.02.

-Jon