Space requirements when installing patches

[krishania]

I normally download the recommended patches once a month and install them on my system. I find that as the cluster becomes bigger, it give a "not enough space in /var to install" message and does not install, unless I remove files and makes space, but when the installtion is complete, it has not really taken up all the space it said it needed!!!

My questions are:
1) does the recommended patches have all the old packages that were added from the previous time?
2) Does it look for space to add all these packages, without checking if the packages are already installed?
3) What do I have to do to not install packages that have already being installed, without having to manually go in and take those packages out?
4) I don't want to use the -nosave option, in case I want to back out of a patch. The readme file says "not backing out an older rev before installing a newer rev will cause showrev -p to continue to show the older rev along with the newer rev.......It just may, however, avoid confusion and be more economical to first backout an older patch revision before installing a newer revision." Is there a command to "purge" these, or do I have to manually go in and back out of an older revision?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

 

[Annihilannic]

1) No, it generally only contains the newest version of each patch (which should be all you need).
2) Probably.
3) Unfortunately it's not very intelligent. I ended up writing a script which removed the patches already installed from the patch_order file, which speeds up the patching process significantly.
4) You would have to manually remove it. Does anyone bother? Annihilannic.