The procedures shown in this section illustrate the following best practices for updating IPS package repositories:
Keep each repository updated with all support updates for that release. Support updates contain security updates and other important fixes.
Do not try to choose particular fixes to apply from a support update. Do not add a subset of packages from a support update to your repository. Add all of the content of the support update to your local repository. The default behavior of the pkgrecv command is to retrieve all versions of all packages.
Do not skip a support update. Accumulate all applicable support updates in each repository.
Users can update to a version earlier than the latest version in the repository by specifying the version of the entire incorporation package to install. See Chapter 4, Updating or Upgrading an Oracle Solaris Image, in Adding and Updating Software in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .
Update a copy of the repository. This practice helps ensure that systems do not access the repository while the repository is being updated. Create a snapshot of your repository before you update the repository, clone the snapshot, perform the update, and replace the original repository with the updated clone.
If you are maintaining multiple copies of package repositories with the same content, use the following procedure to update one of those identical repositories. See Maintaining Multiple Identical Local Repositories for the procedure to update the additional repositories from this master repository.