As for the problems you had with the Sun Studio patches, I think it’s because the documentation on pca was misleading, esp. concerning the search patterns. “pca”, “pca -l” and “pca -l missing” actually produce the same result – all patches missing on the current machine. When using a search pattern like /Studio/, pca will show *all* patches, no matter for which Solaris release or architecture – this is mostly useful to answer questions like “what are all patches ever produced for Sun Studio?”.

In your case, you could have run “pca -H | grep Studio > patches.txt” followed by “pca -i patches.txt” to install all missing Sun Studio patches. I understand that this is too complicated, which is why I now have modified pca’s usage of search patterns to make it more flexible. Please read about it on:

http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/news.html

With the new development version of pca, a simple “pca -p Studio -i” is sufficient to achieve what you want.

As mentioned by Laurent, you could download the Sun Studio patches because they are available without a Sun Online Account. pca will not re-use this information from a previous configuration of Sun Update Manager. You have to specify it explicitly via -a/–askauth or in pca’s configuration file.

As for your thoughts about Sun’s patch management tools in general, I second everything you say. This, and because I’m a big fan of Solaris, is the main reason why I’m investing a lot of time in PCA.