UPS, UPD and UPP v4

What are UPS, UPD and UPP?

UPS (UNIX Product Support) is a software support toolkit developed at Fermilab for the management of software products on local systems by the system administrators and users. It was also designed to facilitate the product distribution and configuration management tasks of the product providers. The three principal user benefits are:

• a uniform interface for accessing all products on a UNIX (or UNIX-like, e.g., Cygwin) system via the setup command
• unified and coordinated support of in-house and vendor-supplied software across all the supported UNIX operating systems
• the capacity for running multiple concurrent versions of products on the same system, with a standard, simple version-selection mechanism

UPD (UNIX Product Distribution) is a companion product to UPS, and provides the functionality for uploading/downloading products between local systems and product distribution servers.

UPP (UNIX Product Poll) is a layer on top of UPD that allows a client to request notification of changes in a distribution node database and to download pre-specified products. UPP can be automated. This is a useful tool for keeping abreast of changes/enhancements to your favorite products.

Many older products will lose their "current" chains on Jan 20, 2005!