Why is the October Patch Bundle from July?

Strange blog headline, isn’t it? Intentionally. Peter Lehmann mailed me a question – and asked more or less: Why is the October Patch Bundle from July? Sounds strange? It is strange …

Strange notation

Peter wanted to download the most recent patch bundle for Grid Infrastructure from October. And he found patch 28507693:

But he was wondering about the headline having the date of October 18, 2018 together with JUL 2018.

Why is the October Patch Bundle from July?

How does this make sense??

Flashback

When you flash back to the day when we introduced “Updates” (RU) and “Revisions” (RUR) you may remember that we release quarterly “Updates” and “Revisions” whereas a Revision is based on a previous Update adding just security and regression fixes.

See here:

Hence, in this case you are looking at the Revision 1 of the July 2018 Update for GI 12.2.0.1.

Why is the October Patch Bundle from July?

 

This is why the October patch has July in the name

Actually I followed the internal discussion about how to name these patches and there’s no perfect solution. I think it would be more obvious when the patch tag line would display RU or RUR at first instead of a long phrase where you easily overlook the “Revision” keyword.

The solution

My solution is using the Patch Download Advisor note knowing that it is not updated the day the patches get released.

Then your choice is much easier – and you won’t access accidentally the Revision when you are looking for the Update:

Why is the October Patch Bundle from July?

There’s an GI Update for October 2018 and a GI Revision 1 for October based on the GI Update of July adding only regression and security fixes.

Sorry for the strange notation. If you have a bullet-proof idea how to better name the patches to avoid confusion, I’ll happily explain it to the owners of the process.

–Mike

 

 

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