What I believe it says is that only security patches are freely available now.
Recommended patches, Patch Clusters and plain maintenance patches are no longer available without a Sunsolve login that's tied to a support contract.
Does this mean that if you have:
Patch A (S) requires
Patch B (R+S) requires
Patch C (S) requires
Patch D (R)
That patch D is also retrievable without a contract?
eg for instance, the kernel jumbo patch (120011-14) (R+S) requires patch 120900-04 (notR/S). Currently 120900-04 is downloadable, but how do we know this from patchdiag.xref - there's no reference to it being a R or S patch at all.
I've seen dependencies that are 6-deep, and I hope that Sun has considered all the different combinations that could occur on a system. For instance, some patches are conditional, depending on which packages are also installed (Zones springs to mind). Otherwise this is going to be a complete mess.
If I, as a Sun spectrum customer, download non-S patches, and "slipstream" these into a flash archive (ie an existing flar which I unpack into a temp directory, and then use patchadd -R), is that flar then "encumbered" and not allowed to be deployed to build new systems that are not yet under support?
(This would be in the case where not all of our systems are covered under a Solaris Everywhere suport contract).
Does this mean that I would have to maintain two different flars - one which includes patches, and one which doesn't.
Similarly, What about automatic patching tools that you dump patches into, and those tools then search and apply patches to all the systems? Unless a patch is somehow signified as a non-distributable patch, I can't see how this could be differentiated.
