NW6SP4 is a good service pack

Novell just posted a bunch of beta service-packs, including the beta SP5 for Netware 6. To me, that seems pretty quick. To the paranoid, this could seem to indicate a problem with the latest service packs if they're going to release one this quickly. But, lets take a look at the public patches posted since SP4 released:

Go to here for the source of this list.
Packetscan - NetWare packet capture toolA utility, not a patch. Improves on a previous utiltity that allows packet captures at the netware console. Really nice, even if it doesn't include the capability to filter yet.
PKI Diag Utility 2Another utility, not a patch. Improves on the previous PKIDIAG utility.
iPrint Client 3.05 with Silent Install optionAn improved installer for iPrint that includes the ability to install silently. While not a patch for broken, it is a patch for a most-requested-feature.
Printer Agent Conversion Utility v2.1Another utility, not a patch. Improves the ability of administrators to handle multiple NDPS printers and a migration to iPrint
TCP update for NetWare 6The first actual PATCH so far
Remote Debugging ToolsAnother utility, mostly to assist Novell tech-support and developers
BorderManager ICSA Compliance Kit v5.0bWhile a patch, it's a patch for a product that doesn't ship with Netware. Infact, using this patch on a non BorderManager server can greatly reduce the functionality of your Netware
So of the public updates released since SP4, only ONE actual patch is in the list. I know from watching things that the TCP stack was updated on all netware platforms at that time.

So lets go over to the Beta side of the updates. That list can be found here. The magic date is Feb 19, 2004 which is when SP4 hit public. But it was in beta for a while, so I'm going to assign a code-freeze date of Jan 1, 2004. With that in mind, I count 6 actual patches; two of which are backup-system related. All in all, a very minor number.

To my reading, this tells me that SP4 is a very good patch. It didn't break much, and SP5 shouldn't be the kind of service-pack-fix that NW41SP8 was for NW41SP7.