The SoftInst project
The primary person working on this project at the present time is:
Many of the concepts embodied in this project have been developed
through the years of the Tenwen project with the Systems Group. In
particular, the following people have worked on this project:
Also, many other members of the Crew and
Systems have also provided input into
this project and are also installing software via the method presented
here.
Note: This is a work-in-progess, changes may be made regularly.
Ahem, or perhaps more like when time allows.
Goals
- Simple and Straightforward - Clearly define the and
standardized the way software should be installed, making it
easier to understand and do. It should minimize the amount of
tweaking that must be done by sysadmins.
- Version Control - the ability to define the 'current/stable'
version for general use, while still allowing testing of
beta/prototype software by sysadmins and advanced users.
- Automated `Self' Documentation - Make it easy to write
tools to extract various information and generate help documents and
"What's Installed" lists to help users know what's new and
cool. (See our Current System)
- Flexible Software -- Try to make the tools as flexible and
general as possible, so they can work just as well in other
environments.
Auxilliary goals:
- Sharing of compiled applications between sites.
- Minimize redundant use of file system.
- Fault-Tolerance and load balancing through multiple servers.
- Simple management of user's PATH (Stronger associations with Soft)
Overview
Installing and managing software in a large installation, is often a
daunting task. Here at CCS, our software environment currently
contains some 500+ different
packages, clearly, a well defined method of installing software is
needed, or it would quickly become unmanageable. In actuality, we
already have a reasonable method of installing software which we
developed during the developement stages of Newnet. However
we are still striving to improve on this by defining it in even more
detail and creating new tools to make it easier to install and
maintain software packages.
Our general model is to install software into a self-contained
directory, called a package. We
collect many of these packages into a group, called collections. In these collections, there will
be 'link-farms' which collect all of the related parts of each package
into a single toplevel directory (all the binaries for example). By
using consistent names for software and directories, we are able to
use scripts to automatically do much of the work, and we are able to
share application installations between sites.
Details
Software Installation Documentation and Tools
Related Works
This is one of the projects under development by members of the
Systems Group during Fall quarter of 1994.
If you have any comments or questions about this project, please post
them to the ccs.systems.discuss newsgroup.