The packaging for the product consists of an Installation/Support CD and a Core Product CD.
The Installation/Support CD contains the aforementioned distribution setup scripts and packages, as well as any supporting packages and patches that may need to be installed on the system prior to core product installation.
The packaging dependencies are shown in figure 1. The diagram illustrates the OS dependent packages for three different operating sytems (RedHat, Caldera and SuSE) and also shows how we can choose to revoke or maintain backward compatibility as we revise the distribution dependent components: the SuSE package provides the virtual package required by both the 3.01 and 4.0 versions of our product. This use of multiple virtual packages provides us with extremely fine grained tuning of our operating system support.
Additionally, the distribution rpm packages themselves have requirements on essential system packages. The rpms will fail to install if the customer's system does not contain these packages. The customer must then install the necessary packages before proceeding.
Once the Installation/Support CD has been successfully installed, it can be assumed that the system is prepared to run the core product. The core product rpm packages can then be installed from the Core Product CD.