Software installation opinions needed

[Elizabeth Zwicky]

 I recently discovered a whole new class of installation headaches. We
now run Sun 3 clients from Sun 4 servers, exclusively.  *Every*
facility machine that is a boot server is a Sun 4; conversely, every
diskless client (and we still have about a hundred of them) is a Sun
3. We don't export file systems with root... The number of installation
scripts that this smashes to pieces is amazing (start with every
package that uses a binary to install with). In most cases, I can get
things off tape on a server, temporarily export a relevant file system
with root to one of the staff Sun 3s, do the install, undo the export
and go on. So far, nothing has demanded to access the tape drive from
the install script, which is a good thing, since the tape drives are
on the servers and they don't trust the clients...

Packages that demand to be installed into their final location,
compiling in path names, are a worse headache; we mount /usr/local
read only, so in this case I have to redo not only the exports file
but also the auto-mount map. Since we do automount /usr/local from
redundant locations, there's the added challenge of getting the
exports changed on the /usr/local that the machine I'm using mounts -
short-circuting automounter here is not impossible, but isn't easy
either, especially since my shell happens to be in /usr/local.

I'm not crazy about this, but I can stand it. What I can't stand is
programs that expect me to be able to modify them with their
binary-only programs at more or less random times, like Interleaf,
which wants me to run a program to read its printer definition files
every time I change the printcaps. This happens more often than you
might think, as we add, subtract, and move printers to keep up with
project needs. (Currently I simply work around the question by having
my printcap building programs also do the work Interleaf's program
does, but that's hardly my idea of a good time - just the least
horrible time I could have in the circumstances.)

(For more fun, try recompiling everything in /usr/local into a test
location with another name - you can either compile things so that
they will probably work when you move them into /usr/local, or so that
you can actually test them in the test location, in most cases.)

	Elizabeth Zwicky