[1123] in IS Home Pages
Possible Model for Software Distribution
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin M. Cunningham)
Tue Mar 28 14:46:16 2000
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Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 14:46:08 -0500
To: swrt@mit.edu, mitapps@mit.edu
From: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@MIT.EDU>
Cc: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@mit.edu>, ishome@mit.edu
Howdy,
I was looking at examples of how other schools make their "core software" available to their community, and noticed a program called "Scout" at Iowa State. It is basically an installation manager -- you get it once, and it helps you download and keep track of what software you've downloaded from a central source using ftp. It seems to handle a legal issue we've been ignoring (requiring user to okay a legal readme before installing) and proactively inform the user of new versions of software. There are versions of Scout for Mac and Windows. Most interestingly, Iowa State uses Athena (they call it Project Vincent), so Scout relies on Kerberos for its security, and would be a natural fit in our environment (I imagine). See:
http://www.cc.iastate.edu/micronet/hn_scout.html
It could be that we could press CDs for basic network connectivity, and use something like Scout (of course, an MIT-mutated version... ;-) to get the other programs downloaded and managed. Maybe we don't have to invent the wheel after all...
(One of the early "Self-Help" proposals included a "configuration checker", which Scout seems to embody in the broader context of software distribution...)
Do we have any contacts at Iowa? (Someone named Rod Eldridge is mentioned in the documentation, presumably the primary developer).
--Kevin
