ITRC Patch Downloads

[George_145]

And while I'm here....

A lot of the concerns with the ITRC patch page that were voiced at last years BoF, and questions that had come up in forums and to me in email were answered with "this is planned for the next release".

Well, we've had the next release a while ago. Is the ITRC ECO functionality any better? What problems are you still having? What enhancements do you want to see? What were you promised and didn't get?

[labadie_1]

An enhancement I would like to see is that when a patch has a problem, it should be immediately put "ON HOLD", so that it is no longer possible to download it.

Yes I am talking about the patch SYS V1 for Vms 7.3-2, if applied, it is no longer possible to boot. The SYS V2 corrected the problem.

Thanks a lot.

Gerard

[labadie_1]

It would be great to sort the patches by arrival date (to check quickly of a patch has appeeared since I updarted a customer). It seems that the patch list sorts by criticity, and then by date.
And an image index would be great.

[George_145]

Gerard,

One of the problems with putting a kit on hold is that there is a timezone lag in when the hold can actually take effect. After the SYS kit problem, I asked the ITRC to look at a way that kit submitters could put kits on hold directly and immediately rather than having to wait for someone to receive and take action on an email. It is being looked at.

As far as sorting by date, there is really no good way to do it right now. The FAQ talks about sorting by date string keywords but that really doesn't work. The best I can suggest is to look at the Master List if one is available. It lists kits by release date (though, right now, only the OS kits are listed.


Where would you like to see an image index? All the images are listed in the first page or two of the TXT file.

George

[labadie_1]

About the image index, I thought about it for each Vms version, for example, for Vms 7.3-1 or 7.3-2. that would be helpful.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello,

I do second the sort by date request. Also a search for layered product patches would be nice. We recently had a thread here
( http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=556397 )
where somebody was looking for the most current ECO for a specific TCP/IP version. There is currently no way to find this easily via ITRC.

Another issue is technical stability of the service. Recently there was an outage of several days where you could not search for 7.3-1 patches (7.3-2 was fine though IIRC).

And yes, the patch service became much better with the new release in my opinion.

As for wishes: Since the site uses cookies anyhow, could you store the info which patches a user already did download and mark them accordingly in the list?

Greetings, Martin

[David B Sneddon]

George,

The changes have made it better than it was.
As mentioned by others -- sorting by date makes
it very easy to spot recent additions.
Any changes to make it more like the old Sydney
ECO site would be appreciated. (If you could take the old Sydney site and add the ability to
do multiple patches in one download you would
have the perfect combination.)

Regards
Dave

[Cass Witkowski]

I would like to be able to search for a fix across multiple versions of the OS. For example If there is a problem and it has been back ported to several versions would be nice to see what all ECOs in the different version have the fix. Some of us support multiple versions of the OS and having to search for a problem with the varied number of versions is slow. DSNlink did it

[Willem Grooters]

(OT)
Martin,

to be discussed in BoF!

[Roger_Fraser]

I, too, would like to see sort by date; but I would also like to see "search by date across all versions".
As a member of a very large company with systems at all versions of VMS, I would like to be able to search for all patches which have been released in the last 7 days, 14 days or month.
At present searching by date using a keyword of, for example, 200404* often returns patches released in March as well as April - this is mildly annoying; but I can still only do this for one version at a time.
Regards,
Roger