Software Distributor Administration Guide for HP-UX 11i

Managing Patches
Introduction
Chapter 5164
Introduction
SD-UX gives you the ability to perform patch management operations
including installation, copying, listing, removing, rollback, and
committal. Patch-related features of SD-UX include:
• Command options for patch management functions.
• Software objects and attributes for identifying and managing
patches.
• An interactive patch management tool.
NOTE You can use the SD-UX remote operations features for patch
management. See Chapter 6, “Remote Operations Overview,” on
page 189 and “Installing Patches to Remote Systems” on page 174.
For More
Information
For more information on patching HP-UX products, see HP-UX Patch
Management: A Guide to Patching HP-UX 11.X Systems. This document
is available under the
Patch Management section of:
http://docs.fc.hp.com/hpux/os/11i/oe/
Patch Concepts
A patch is defined as software packaged with the is_patch attribute set
to true.
As with non-patch software, patches are structured into products and
filesets. By convention on HP-UX, patch products are given unique
names, but their fileset names match the corresponding base filesets
that they patch. In general, patches are intended to be managed (that is,
installed, copied, or removed) at the product level.
Each patch fileset has associated with it an ancestor fileset, which is
the base software that it patches. A patch fileset may not be installed on
a target system unless its ancestor fileset is also being installed or is
already present on the system. Similarly, an ancestor fileset cannot be
removed without also removing all of its patches. A patch fileset’s
ancestor is identified by its ancestor attribute.