Subject: Re: Upgrading Solaris 2.x

From: [email-masked] (Casper H.S. Dik)
Date: 27 Feb 1994 10:02:32 GMT

[email-masked] (Michael C. Loewen) writes:

>   It seems that, even when the newest Solaris 2.x hits the streets, it is
>immediately followed by a whole series of patches which should be applied, if
>you want a reliable system.  But, there's a choice to make: use up additional
>disk space by saving the old code, or installing the patch with the -d option
>to save space.  The immediate benefit of 'installpatch -d' would seem to be a
>space savings, but what happens when it's time to upgrade to the next version
>of Solaris?  My understanding is that you either upgrade from an unpatched
>version (alternately, the upgrade process will back out the patches, if
>possible), or else you do a complete install of the new Solaris.

When upgrading to 2.2 you needed a virgin system or you needed to
backout the patches beforehand. (And you needed to save the old files)

When upgrading to 2.3, the patches wouldn't be backed out.
Instead, the package instances installed by pacthes are
removed (in principle, this only modifies /var/sadm/install/contents).

After upgrading, the pathc directories where removed  (only those that
had been superceded by the upgrade, not, e.g., compiler patches.)

Casper