Justin pointed out to me tonight that the new Recommended and Security patch clusters for Solaris 10 were quite large. And right he was.. It seems that in the last month or so the 10 Recommended patch cluster has grown from 400meg to over 1GB in size now. (not to mention that he said you need almost 2.5 gig of space to unzip it.)
Looking at the cluster readme, I can take a guess as to why it is so large, there are multiple kernel patches. There are also updates to Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash plugin, multiple Java Updates and a patch for the defunct Mozilla 1.7 browser (which in my opinion should just be removed completely).
The interesting part is that the X86 patch cluster is over 300Meg smaller than the sparc one. The only major difference that I can think of is that X86 doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat Reader yet.
I wish Sun would just offer a ISO download of all the patches now (sort of like the EIS dvd) for the public. Also need to find a faster way to download the patches.