A Management System for Network-Shareable Locally Installed Software: Merging RPM and the Depot Scheme Under Solaris

Efficient management of locally installed software is a recurring central theme of system administration. We report here on an experimental merger of two previously independent systems: Redhat’s RPM Package Manager (RPM), an open-source database-driven system developed by a major Linux vendor to manage software on a single host; and, an enhanced version of depot, a well-established set of conventions used to manage software that is installed on a server and shared over a network with multiple (possibly heterogeneous) clients. The combination remedies shortcomings in both systems, but to be fully effective, extensions to RPM are required, particularly to its database system. The results of this study point the way toward a secondgeneration network-distributed version of RPM.