24 Jan
2017
24 Jan
'17
5:27 a.m.
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
24 Jan
24 Jan
6:06 p.m.
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(a)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
6:46 p.m.
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(a)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(a)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
7:58 p.m.
On 24 Jan 2017, at 17:46, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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 don't think it could. I also remember that SunOS 4's installer was somehow
much more rudimentary. I remember (for both) that things like patches were just tarballs
or some equivalent: there was no registry I think. However my memory is not reliable.
--tim
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3 comments
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participants (3)
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Clem Cole -
Henry Bent -
Tim Bradshaw