Every so often having comments on here really pays off. A commenter on my previous entry gave me a pointer to pca (Patch Check Advanced), an actual sane patch management program for Solaris machines; if you want more reasons to take a look, see my longer comments .

One of the nice things about pca is that it led me to the patchdiag.xref file, which is a big cross index of all of the Solaris patches, and to patches.sun.com in general. Patchdiag.xref is in a crappy format but clearly it can be parsed, which means it can be turned into XML, which can be turned into Atom feeds . I think I have a project. (Time to learn XSLT.)

(I'm surprised Sun doesn't already have an XML version of patchdiag.xref . It's not like they're shy about using Java for system management applications, and Java apps usually love XML.)

So thank you, semi-anonymous commenter, for the pointer to pca .

(Possibly pca is old news to the really experienced Solaris administrators, in which case I will look sheepish.)