== Some things about _smpatch_

_smpatch_ is the official Sun thing for dealing with Solaris patches for
Solaris 8 and 9 (Solaris 10 apparently has an all new system, hopefully
better). I got interested in _smpatch_ not just because it's the official
Sun tool for this stuff, but because it has one feature that
_[[pca EasierPatchManagement]]_ doesn't: it can reliably tell what
patches are safe to be installed on a live multiuser system.

(While [[pca]] can skip patches that require reboots, it doesn't
currently have a 'skip patches that claim to require single user mode'
option. Although the information is theoretically there in the patch
READMEs.)

My first _smpatch_ surprise was how you get it. For Solaris 9, it
isn't distributed as a download; instead the [[download page
http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=40c8c2ad]] blandly tells you
to install three patches.
(For more fun, it gives specific revisions of those three patches,
one of which is now obsolete.)

So I did the smart thing and used [[pca]], whereupon it cheerfully told
me that I already had a current version of patch 112945, the main Sun
Patch Manager 2.0 software patch (according to the [[download page]]).
It turns out 112945 is actually a general patch that is part of the
recommended patch set, so I had it installed long ago.

After that there are a number of other things:
* _smpatch_ needs you to be root. For everything.
* _smpatch_ is achingly slow, even assuming it downloads the
  patch database from Sun *every time*.
* there seems to be no way to get detailed information about a
  patch that _smpatch analyze_ tells you about, such as whether
  it wants reboots or single-user mode or whatever. (I checked
  and _smpatch analyze_ always produces the same output; it
  appears that only _smpatch update_ will do anything different.)
* there's no way to restrict _smpatch_ to just recommended and/or
  security patches.

Overall grade: less than compelling. There seems to be no reason
not to use [[pca]] instead, unless you think that _smpatch_ has
better information on what patches are safe to install on live
multiuser systems than is in the patch READMEs.

(Hat tip to [[Matty's blog http://daemons.net/~matty/blog/]],
where I read enough about _smpatch_ to make it worth checking
out.)