21 Nov
2020
21 Nov
'20
11:50 p.m.
Things were pretty much ad hoc. Commercial software likely came
as tar/cpio tapes to install however the vendor wanted. Free software
was from USENET in source code, so again, however people wanted.
The AT&T Unix PC (7300 / 3B1) in the late 80s had a file format
for installing software from floppy and tracked what was installed,
but that was unique to it.
Package managers as we know them today really became a big thing
with Linux. Redhat's RPM was one of the earliest.
My two cents; I'm sure others remember it differently.
Arnold
Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello All,
I know I have asked this before, but I am curious about any new replies or
insight. How did package management start? Were sites keeping track of
packages installed in a flat file that you could grep (as god intended)
somewhere, or were upgrades and additions simply done without significant
announcement? At what point did someone decide, 'Hey, we need to have a
central way to track additional software"?
I know of DEC's setld and SGI's inst in the latter half of the '80s.
What
was the mechanism before that?
-Henry