[comp.software.config-mgmt] Release manufacturing and installation
Saw this on a newsgroup and thought of dpkg. I'll also forward my reply
to debian-devel.
Bill Gribble
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From: heidi@news (Heidi Steward )
Newsgroups: comp.software.config-mgmt
Subject: Release manufacturing and installation
Hi all,
I have the daunting task of trying to find a commercial (or freeware) system
to help us do the manufacture and installation of releases of code on to
multiple flavors of Unix boxes. We are rolling out ClearCase for internal
config-mgmt, but there is the larger issue of how to get all the right
pieces on to the final CD for release to customers (release manufacturing).
I have almost totally decided that there is nothing out there to help. If
a company is small and has a small number of products, it is all done by hand.
If a company is larger, it has usually translated the hand building of a
release to some (usually) horribly twisted and complicated mechanism to try
to keep track of all of the versions of products and their dependencies.
Some manufacturers are standardizing the installation mechanisms (IBM has
created a nice packaging system for AIX called lpps but SVR4 uses a different
packaging system, and SVR3 doesn't have one at all), but they are only
standard for their own flavor of Unix. This means our release CD has to have
different information on it for the installation on different machine types.
I have found Cicero (package installation system for an Integrated
Computing Environment). It's out of NASA Langley. It is not yet fully
public, but some of the tools are becoming available. It however does no
dependency checking, it only does package verification (with encrypted keys).
Other than starting with the stuff available in Cicero and adding the
dependency stuff, does anyone have any ideas? Are there other groups I
should be posting this to?
Thanks!!
Heidi
heidi@plaza.ds.adp.com
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