Local Disk Depot - Customizing the Software Environment
Walter C. Wong
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
The depot model, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, provides a
method for managing third-party and locally developed software. Depot
uses an object-oriented approach to managing software; each software
package is managed as one or more logical objects. Yet, from the
perspective of a user, the multiple "software objects'' appear as a
single, integrated, software environment. Local disk depot (ldd) is an
extension to the depot framework. ldd facilitates the management of
environments that "inherit'' software from the "master'' software
environments. The inherited software environment is formed by taking
software and configuration information from the master software
environments, and integrating that with local software and
configuration information. The most common use of ldd is to have an
inherited environment on the local disk of a workstation. This allows
the workstation administrator to locally cache software in order to
improve performance and availability of critical software in the event
of server or network failure. The inherited environments, however, can
be used for more than saving local copies of remote
software. Workstation administrators can introduce customizations to
the software environment, as well as add additional software, even
from other software environments. Developers can easily test new or
updated applications on their own machines in an environment that is
otherwise identical to the released environment.
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