Pca (Patch Check Advanced) is a lovely program for dealing with Solaris patches. To quote its site:

Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in correct order.

It is miles better than any of the alternatives I've seen (including Sun's own stuff) and looks like it's going to be pretty much the only tool I need to manage Solaris patches. Highly recommended.

Handy features:

• just plain works. Does the right (and smart) things by default.
• simple Perl script that requires no setup; you can download and run.
• doesn't require root privileges for most operations; easy to try out.
• can list (or install) only patches that don't require reboots.
• can create patch reports for remote machines, given just a bit of info about them.
• can get all patches if you have a SunSolve account/etc.

As the author says, he wrote pca because he didn't accept that patch management had to be cumbersome. He succeeded.

Do check periodically for updates; as the Notes section indicates, Sun every so often does peculiar things with their patch list that have to be worked around.

Credit where credit is due department: I found out about pca from a comment left by one of the MIE admins on this techblog entry. Thank you very much.