Just for completeness on this summary, I should point out that although
my analysis was that it was preferable overall to never backout patches
first, several people sent reponses saying that backing out first was
the way they had always done it and that they had not run into any
trouble. Joe Gotobed sent me an interesting contrasting insight based
on his talks with Sun that is the only viewpoint I've seen which
presents a logical argument for always backing out. I guess it just
depends on how you want your system to look. I've included Joe's
email below.
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Jim Napier jnapier@soe.ucsd.edu
Systems Administration (619)534-5212
School of Engineering
UC San Diego
"Man is nature's way of demonstrating that a little knowledge can
be dangerous."
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I've been advised to *always* backout earlier versions of patches. The
rational was that produces a system that looks just like it's been
freshly loaded from the cdroms, followed by the most recent revs of
whatever patches were added. Loosing the rev history was a "feature"
of this approach :-).
But as you note, the installation order may produce different results.
Joe
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