Beware that the distribution of free free software is closely related to the use of rdist. You should consult the page related to rdist.
VLT and the rest of ESO are now sufficiently aligned (in principle at least), that in this document free software is not classified by project or operating system, but merely by it's storage location and the method by which it was built. Anomalies are noted.
Software was previously compiled on the distribution server, and installed into /usr/server/{bin,man,lib}, with the following exceptions:
Pre-compiled software was downloaded from the HP Porting and Archive Centre (HP-UX 9-10.20) and from The Solaris Freeware Center (Solaris 2.4-2.6).
These 'packages' unfortunately want to be installed into /opt, which means that in order to centralise storage and maintainance of these packages, symbolic links must be created on *all* /usr/server clients, from /opt/packagename to /usr/server/opt/packagename. This has been done for a small number of systems.
An additional drawback of this approach is that users' PATHs get longer and longer as each package's own 'bin' directory must be added to PATH.
The new approach is to package things using poisson:/disks/diska/SUPPORT/esopkg, to download sources to a local source archive on poisson:/disks/diska/eso_src_archive, and then make HP-UX 10 and Solaris 2 packages to be stored under poisson:/disks/diska/eso_package_archive.
The advantage of this approach over the previous one is firstly that we specify the installation directory as /usr/server/opt/packagename at compile time, and so there is no need for links from /opt/packagename to /usr/server/opt/packagename. Secondly *we* do the compiling which brings with it more assurance about security and greater flexibility.
In order to keep user's PATHs short, there is still the need to make links from the traditional places (i.e. /usr/server/{bin,man,lib}, /usr/server/gnu/{bin,man,lib}) to the corresponding directories under /usr/server/opt/packagename. In order to make these links use te16:/root/bin/pkglink.sh and poisson:/root/bin/pkglink.sh (rdist'ed from poisson).
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