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. See Best Practices for Creating and Using Local IPS Package Repositories and Oracle Solaris Repository Content for more information.
Users can update to a version earlier than the latest version in the repository by specifying the version of the pkg:/entire constraint package to install. See Updating to a Version Older Than the Newest Version Allowed in Updating Systems and Adding Software in Oracle Solaris 11.4.
For information about keeping your repository as small as possible see Minimal Required Repository and the remove and replace instructions in Step 3 in How to Update a Local IPS Package Repository.
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.