Depot-Lite: A Mechanism for Managing Software
John P. Rouillard and Richard B. Martin
University of Massachusetts at Boston
Abstract
Previous versions of depot type schemes for maintaining software,
including the NIST depot[5], Xheir[8], CMU depot[2] and its
extensions[10], address the needs of a large site with knowledgeable
software specialists. At the University of Massachusetts at Boston,
software support is provided by a number of student operators, and
faculty members. A new lighter weight depot scheme was needed to
reduce the amount of knowledge needed by these less experienced
software installers. In addition, we needed a depot scheme that would
allow the concurrent operation of multiple versions of the same
software package on a given host. This paper presents a refinement of
the depot scheme that works well for a smaller site, that does not
have dedicated software specialists, as well as a larger site that is
interested in getting the efficiency and modularity advantages that
the depot scheme offers.
Although we use the modules package and the amd automounter to ease
the administration of depot-lite, neither tool is mandatory for its
operation.
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