Solaris

Hi guys,

I am really new to Solaris. My question is about the patching package management. Now I was provided some old packages within that there are hard-coded codes written with commands like "patchadd", so anyway I can make them work with Solaris 11?

Cheers!

I'm not sure that I understand your question clearly but you can (should) only apply patches to any particular Solaris version which are (issued by Oracle) intended for that version. Oracle issues patches to fix things which are not quite right.

This is different from 'packages' authored by third parties which may or may not install on any particular Solaris version.

So if you have old packages along with necessary Solaris patches that you want to run, then you should install the older Solaris version they were intended for.

No you can't, or at least the patchadd part won't work. This command has been obsoleted with Solaris 11 and is no more available. The whole SVR4 package patching approach doesn't exist anymore under Solaris 11 and replaced by IPS package updating. You might still install some SVR4 packages (pkgadd) but you won't be able to patch them later, only replace them by a newer version.

@hicksd8, @jlliagre, thank you guys so much for quick response!

your comments resolved my question well and I can conclude that my expectation is not possible, but I cannot help thinking why Solaris does not even keep the basic backward compatibility?

It does. Should you really need a Solaris 10 package and its patches, you can install them in a Solaris 10 branded zone under Solaris 11.

The concrete use case is that we have some old software(and its hotfix packages) developed for Solaris 10, now we would like to move them to Solaris 11. unfortunately those hotfixes are written hard-coded with commands like "patchadd", that is why we need this very command in the new platform(the bottom-line is we won't change the hotfixes).

I never touched Solaris before this week, so whether branded zone serves the purpose will need more investigation.

There can be patches only for packages built by Sun/Oracle. What software and patches is this about? Patches created for Solaris 10 do not make sense when the OS is Solaris 11.