A few notes about some "new" metalink notes

After a week of vacation, I came back to work to wrap up some Service Requests with Oracle Support and query for a status on others. During that process, I was made aware of a "new" vehicle for patch delivery, documented in Metalink note 438314.1. Apparently, Oracle is trying something new with NApply CPU patch; it sounds promising, and I sure hope it successfully addresses the issues from past CPU patches and the difficulty with merges, as proudly declared in the note. What I do not quite understand is that there are still going to be Super Merge patches; we have a particular bug that did not make the April CPU, so it was being worked on for the July CPU. It missed that, so we were told it was going in the July Super Merge patch. How does NApply deal with that?

What I am most confused by is the claim in the first set of bullet points:

Elimination of the CPU Merge Patch as a vehicle for patch conflict resolution

What exactly does that mean? Obviously, there will still be merge patches; just read further down in the note and you can see how a customer has to report a conflict, and Oracle will supply a merge patch. That is the documented procedure. Perhaps what Oracle is trying to say is that they will not ship a CPU that has your particular patch merged in, but rather a small little merge fix (aka "bandaid") that will allow the existing/original CPU to be applied. That sounds like a good thing. I remain skeptical and want to see it in action, though. *grin*

And on another note (literally), I see that the draft 10.2.0.4 bug list has been published. 1329 undocumented bugs!! Aside from all the "documented" bugs, we are hit with 1329 bug fixes for which we, as a customer, have no clue. 1329 is a big number. How is it that there are that many bugs in the 3rd patchset of its 2nd major release of its newest version of the flagship software? I am baffled.

I long for the day when Oracle has to post a page on OTN that says:

We apologize for the lack of patchsets in the past year; there simply has not been enough bug fixes/patches to justify a large patchset

And to beat another dead horse, how is it that all those bugs are "undocumented". Isn't there a more appropriate word for "fixes and patches for bugs that we are not willing to share any information whatsoever about"? "Unpublished" would be a better word. And granted, I am not going to read through all the "documented" bugs, let alone 1329. I just have a problem with "undocumented" bugs.

Did anything significant happen in the year 1329?