SUMMARY: puzzled by Sun patch instructions

From: Leonardo C. Topa (leo@ai.mit.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 18 1991 - 14:13:16 CST


Here is the long overdue (sorry!) summary for a question I asked a
couple of weekd ago. A Sun engineer had offered to look into this and
I was waiting for his answer, but it never came.......

The question:

   I got a couple of patches from Sun and I am a little confused by the
   presence of *different* files for the sun4 and sun4c architectures.
   For instance, patch 100311-01 (a new version of restore) comes with
   sun4/restore and sun4c/restore, which are binary *different*, both to
   be applied to /usr/etc/restore.
   
   This puzzles me: in a mixed environment of sun4 and sun4c, all sharing
   the same /usr partition, which restore should I use? I can understand
   kvm differences, but what about "normal" files? This is not the only
   patch like this, see also 100305 for something similar...

The consensum seems to be that Sun has screwed up...
The best answer for the differences in the restore copies of patch
1003111 is from Mike Sullivan:

   I don't have any authoritative information, but I don't think there is
   any real difference between the sun4 and sun4c files. "cmp -l" shows
   that the only differences are in the last 624 bytes. The sun4 version
   has some SCCS ids ("@(#)filename"), whereas the sun4c version contains
   zeros. I suspect the sun4 just contains some uninitialized garbage
   beyond the end of the real program (demand paged executable files are
   always a multiple of 4k bytes). I have no idea why Sun built restore
   separately for each kvm architecture. Note that they also built
   separate sun3 and sun3x executables that are identical. Probably the
   person who built the patch didn't know what he was doing. Judging from
   the version numbers of some of the patches, it is clear that Sun
   doesn't always get them right the first time (or the second time, or the
   seventh time... :-).

As for patch 100305-05, more than one person suggested to get the -06
version which has only one copy of lpd.

In general, assuming the patch is good (:-)) I can suggest one way of
"fixing" this weirdness in other patches when "real" differences
exist: use symbolic links. For instance, you could have
/usr/etc/restore pointing to ../kvm/restore

Thanks to:
jfy@cis.ksu.edu (Joseph F. Young)
kevins%Aus@sun.com (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})
macphed@dvinci.usask.ca (Ian MacPhedran)
john@mlb.semi.harris.com (John M. Blasik)
tellab5!balr!vpnet!trdlnk!mike@delta.eecs.nwu.edu (Michael Sullivan)

Leonardo C. Topa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room E25-506
45 Carleton Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

internet: lct@ai.mit.edu



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