Every so often having comments on here really pays off. A commenter on my previous entry gave me a pointer to pca (Patch Check Advanced), an actual sane patch management program for Solaris machines; if you want more reasons to take a look, see my longer comments.

One of the nice things about pca is that it led me to the patchdiag.xref file, which is a big cross index of all of the Solaris patches, and to patches.sun.com in general. Patchdiag.xref is in a crappy format but clearly it can be parsed, which means it can be turned into XML, which can be turned into Atom feeds. I think I have a project. (Time to learn XSLT.)

(I'm surprised Sun doesn't already have an XML version of patchdiag.xref. It's not like they're shy about using Java for system management applications, and Java apps usually love XML.)

So thank you, semi-anonymous commenter, for the pointer to pca.

(Possibly pca is old news to the really experienced Solaris administrators, in which case I will look sheepish.)