Query about swcopy

[Adam Noble]

I am copying a number of patches into a single depot in order to install them all at once with a single re-boot. On the first swcopy a number of the patchers failed to copy saying it was a dependancy issue. Now I can understand this with a swinstall but this makes no sense to me with a swcopy as I may wish to use the depot to install onlaternate architectures with different patch levels. Anyway the man page for swcopy suggests that there are no compatibility checks with swcopy, so why is the swcopy failing. If I set enforce_dependencies to be false it works fine, but this is apparently not reccomended. Can anybody explain this?

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Adam,

Setting enforce_dependencies to false is fine on a swcopy. Are you up to date on patches? Perhaps there's a SD patch that addresses this issue.


Pete

[Martin Johnson]

swcopy does dependency checks so you can make sure you meet all the dependencies. It is a little late to find out about the missing dependencies when you are doing the swinstall.

Like you found out, you can override the check.

Personally, I just include all the dependent patches in the depot just to be safe.

HTH
Marty

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Adam:

Setting '-x enforce_dependencies=false' during a 'swcopy' operation is perfectly acceptable and necessary if any patch being copied lacks any of its dependencies. The idea is that you are deferring the dependency checking until the actual 'swinstall' at which time you should always enforce the dependency analysis. During 'swinstall' analysis, the presence of dependencies either in the depot or already installed on the target (server) satisfies the requirement.

Deferring dependency analysis until installion time is useful too if you have limited disk space in which to build large depots.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Adam Noble]

Cheers for the advice ok I shall continue to use the enforce dependencies option then.

[Helen French]

The dependency will be checked during a swcopy session unless otherwise specified. This is required to make sure that you are not installing anything which is not applicable to your system. The check will be done on both source and target sessions and should be resolved at any one of them.

In your case, if you are creating a common depot for a number of system, you can skip this option using "false" value on dependancy check. You don't need to worry, since the swinstall session will check this again unless specified.