Identify current patch level to a publication date

[jalmda]

We have SPident -v, which shows

Summary               (using 1351 packages)
Product/ServicePack     conflict        match  update      (shipped)
SLE-10-x86_64            0    0%    453 33.5%     201   (2754 16.4%)
SLE-10-x86_64-SP1        0    0%    609 45.1%     206   (2938 20.7%)
SLE-10-x86_64-SP2        0    0%    954 70.6%     209   (3111 30.7%)
Unknown                             397 29.4%


CONCLUSION: System is up-to-date!

But we do not know what the date of the last update was. (We do not allow auto-updates.)

We want to distribute the "same" set of updates to all our customers, on something like quarterly schedule. But how can we verify what patch level their machine has? How can we get a "last update date" out of SMT, SPident, etc?

Individual RPMs, e.g. kernel, may not correspond to to the last update time. SPident -vvv shows a list of RPMs, not dates.

SMT documentation seems, uhh, slim.

Anybody got any ideas?


tia