[TUHS] Package Management

[Henry Bent]

Perhaps I should have been more specific - I was referring to something
akin to Ultrix's setld or IRIX's inst, a user-friendly utility to
view/install/upgrade OS components as well as applications.

Ultrix setld first appeared in 2.0, which was 1987.  As far as I can tell,
IRIX inst appeared at about the same time.  A quick look through some
manuals shows that SunOS 3 (same timeframe) appears to have had a
user-friendly initial setup program but it's not clear to me if it could be
used after an installation to deinstall/modify/upgrade/etc.  I know almost
nothing about early HPUX, AIX, Domain/OS, etc. and hopefully some folks who
used them might be able to chime in.

And yes, setld is pretty bad.  I remember it being painfully slow on real
hardware, and it's still somewhat slow on emulated hardware.

-Henry

On 24 January 2017 at 12:06, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Hmmm - I suspect is depends on what you call package & installation
> management.  My guess is that all of the UNIX systems had something that
> were made from people that were birthed on DEC systems.   Certainly,
> Masscomp's RTU had something very much like VMS's scheme - why because the
> same person designed/influenced/implemented both of them (Tom Kent).
>  My guess is that SunOS, Apollo/Domain et al were similar - as at least
> they knew the importance of same.
>
> The problem I have with the question is that the managers we have today
> are much different than the managers we had then.   Even things as simple
> as BSD's pkg_add is different from RPM much less yum, apt or brew compared
> to the (shutter) setld (DEC's my least favorite).
>
> Clem
>
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:27 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The recent discussion of Solaris made me think - what was the first Unix
>> to have centralized package management as part of the OS?  I know that IRIX
>> had it, I think from the beginning (possibly even for the GL2 releases) but
>> I imagine there was probably something before that.
>>
>> -Henry
>>
>
>
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