Solaris

I'll add to the chorus of saying that is totally wrong.

The patches applied have to be identical. How you get there isn't really important, as long as it's guaranteed to be reproducible. (Downloading directly from the internet is almost certainly NOT reproducible because you're dependent on someone else hosting specific patch versions.)

This is definitely not the route to go. However, here is another thought to think about.

This all depends on the time it takes you to roll your patches through your environment.

We have a 4 environment development strategy.
Dev - Test - QA (PreProd) - Prod

We actually patch our preprod environment first then we roll to prod, dev, test.

I know, sounds a little strange to do it this way but our development cycle is fairly rapid and our patching schedule is not as fast, so we have ran into issues with developing code on a newly patched DEV machine that wouldn't run in the other environments until they got patched. So we found that we patch the preprod systems first, if nothing breaks then roll it into prod, if it does break back out the patch or use the prod image to recover it.

Most of the time code developed on an OS with older patches ran just fine on the OS that is up-to-date on patches. I think I only had 2 instances in 5 years where that didn't happen and I believe that was because of java and a path change.

I don't think that the sequence matters because the original question (over 4 months back now) was all to do with guaranteeing that a consistent set of patches was applied.

Each OS supplier may have different methods, but they all have them and that is what was questioned.



Robin