We have the odd SunOS 4.x box at work for historical reasons, and today I went to apply the free Terix patch for vintage Solaris to them. Of course being SunOS 4.x they didn’t have patchadd, so I tried to do things the hard way:

# cd /var/spool/patch/T000001-01
# ./installpatch
Please borrow a copy of installpatch from another patch.

Goddammit. You get what you pay for, I suppose. (I ended up applying the patch, which just replaces zoneinfo files, by hand, but it didn’t recognize them as valid zoneinfo. I could now go download the master tzdata database and compile it all by hand with zic, but at this point I think I will simply mock SunOS 4 derisively instead.)

I shouldn’t complain about Terix, though. The official Sun patch for “vintage Solaris”, i.e. Solaris prior to 2.8, has a “time and materials” fee of US$ 10,000 per server, to a maximum of US$ 150,000 per company. Mind you, that fixes libc as well so that both zoneinfo (“Canada/Eastern”) and POSIX (“EST5EDT”) timezones work, but I think I’ll take the free zoneinfo patch instead.