rusty@belch.Berkeley.EDU (Rusty Wright) (05/01/91)
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is that after all this time Sun still doesn't have any well designed and consistent method of: 1) Finding out what unbundled products have been installed on the system. 2) Finding out what bundled products have been installed on the system. 3) Installing bundled products from the os distribution media after you've installed a system or you've received a pre-installed system. 4) Installing unbundled products. 5) Removing (uninstalling) bundled or unbundled products. 6) Automatically determining dependency between bundled or unbundled products. E.g., no sense in installing the man pages if you haven't installed nroff. It should tell you to install A if B needs it, but you can override if necessary. For example, when you buy a SPARCstation, it comes with the system pre-installed. But which of the bundled products were pre-installed? After you do manage to figure out what was installed, how do you install something they left off, e.g., from the CD-ROM? DEC has had a well designed and consistent system for this for a long time; it's a program called setld. You use setld to list what has been installed as well as to re-install stuff from the os distribution that you decided you needed later on. You also use setld to install unbundled products. And you use setld to uninstall unbundled and bundled products. For the most part Sun does a better job of making Unix systems, but this is one area where DEC is the *CLEAR* winner. Every year I get to go to this Focus thing at Sun where they have people come in and test installing their newest unreleased version of the os and give them feedback on problems, suggestions, etc. and each time I keep telling them about setld but it just falls on deaf ears.