It seems customary to begin a weblog with a brief intorduction. I work for Sun in the Dublin, Ireland offices, in the Patch System Test (PST) group. fintanr , bnitz , timf and calum are some of the other folks in these buildings that also have blogs here, and their blogs will probably be much more interesting than mine!
So patches eh? Most readers will be aware that you can get patches from sunsolve. But quite a bit happens between the engineer writing the code change and the patch appearing for download. Part of the process involves PST ensuring that the patch passes all our system tests. The group has also been heavily involved with projects such as getting Kernel Update patches released more quickly and patch rejuvination.
There is also a new version of sunsolve in
beta testing. One benefit of this new version is that the search engine works better. Another less well known benefit is that you can now download any version of a patch, whereas the current sunsolve only lets you download the latest. The latest patches provide all the fixes of previous versions, and to have your system as up to date as possible you should install the latest patches, however some customers needed to have access to older (obsoleted) revisions of patches so this is what the new sunsolve will provide on the patch page.