I tried to install firefox 2.0.0.14 on Solaris 8 Sparc last week, and it
would not run. This is the distribution put together by Sun's folks in
China. This version of firefox wants these Solaris patches:

[0]="108434-17" "32-Bit Shared library patch for C++"
[1]="108435-17" "64-Bit Shared library patch for C++"
[2]="108652-79" "X11 6.5.1: Xsun patch"
[3]="108773-18" "SunOS 5.8: IIIM and X Input & Output Method patch"
[4]="109147-27" "SunOS 5.8: linker patch"
[5]="109159-03" "SunOS 5.8: Chinese iconv module updates"
[6]="109704-03" "SunOS 5.8: Japanese iconv patch"
[7]="111721-04" "SunOS 5.8: Math Library (libm) patch"
[8]="113261-02" "SunOS 5.8: UTF-8 locale ICONV patch"
[9]="114542-01" "SunOS 5.8: Adds extended Arabic support"
[10]="111721-04" "SunOS 5.8: Math Library (libm) patch"

At least some of those are really needed, since bypassing the patch
checker resulted in firefox sort of starting and then exploding.

So as an experiment today I compared three "automatic" patch retrieval
methods: pca --askauth -d all (with and without service contract
access) and the current patch cluster (with service contract access).
The idea was to see if any of these would put the system into a
configuration which would let Firefox run without manually downloading
the required patches from the list. The number of patches retrieved was
very different:

[A] pca (no serv. contract) 318
[B} patch cluster (w. serv. contract) 206
[C] pca (w. serv. contract) 530

Comparing the entries in the first two showed a lot of overlap, but
there were entries in each that were not present in the other. For
instance, 108569-08 was in PCA and 108576-52 was in the patch cluster.
1085690-08 is "X11 6.4.1: platform support for new hardware" which is
roughly correct (the hardware for this system is included) but not
really needed (there is no graphics "head" on the system.) 108576-52
is "SunOS 5.8: Expert3D IFB Graphics Patch" which is related to the
SUNWifb package, which is not installed on this system either.

More to the point, for the patches required for firefox to work:

patch [A] [b] [C]
[0] + + +
[1] + + +
[2] + - + (108652-98 obsoleted by 119067-01)
+ + + (119067-09)
[3] + + +
[4] + + +
[5] - - -
[6] - - -
[7] + + +
[8] - - +
[9] - - -
[10] + - +

I think it will be ok to skip patches 5,6,9 so long as a I never
hit Asian or Arabic language sites, and start firefox with

export MOZILLA_SOLARIS_PATCHCHECKER=disable_patchchecker

I'm not quite sure what the base package is for those patches, although
it appears that it may be iconv. The patched files are not currently
present on my system.

The absence of patch 8 in the non service contract pca list was odd.
It might have been a glitch. Hope so. Otherwise folks without a
service contract are not going to be able to run this version of Firefox
on Solaris 8.

For patch 2 PCA correctly picked up the final patch in the chain, but
for some reason also kept the final patch in the series before the patch
number changed. Perhaps that is a bug in pca.

So, it looks like PCA does get more of the patches that are needed for
firefox than the patch cluster does. At the expense of downloading 2.5X
more patches, and at least one which is obsoleted by another patch it
also downloaded.

Regards,

David Mathog