Removing a patch often removes implicitly installed older revisions. It will remove patches back to the last explicitly installed patch. Explicitly installed patches are patches that you physically install. Implicitly installed patches are changes that are included in an earlier patch. For example, if you installed patch –8 and then patch –10 , the latest patch ( –10 ) includes the changes from earlier patches; therefore, patch –10 implicitly obsoletes patch –9.
There is a special case, where the patch to be removed is also obsoleted by another patch family. In this case, the removal of this implicitly installed patch will remove the other explicitly installed patch family. Beginning with Sun Connection 1.1.1, you can limit the removal of the implicitly installed patches only to ones that are not obsoleted by other patch families.
The following is an example of the change in behavior:
Sun Connection version 1.1 and earlier will remove patch -9 and all the other family (obsolete it).
Sun Connection 1.1.1 will not recommend the removal of patch -9. However, if you remove patch -10, and patch -9 was implicitly installed, then patch -9 is uninstalled.