[7] in Layered Athena

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Another item for the list

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Wed Oct 28 19:01:47 1992

From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 92 16:00:26 -0800
To: layered-athena@MIT.EDU

What about updates to the vendor OS and programs?  Can a new release of the
vendor OS be put on underneath the Athena layers, or will it be necessary
to upgrade the vendor OS and then reinstall the Athena layers?  

If there are patches to the vendor software is there a way to distribute
these to user's machines without working on each machine individually?

It might help to think about the problem as if you were in the business
of supporting user workstations independent of the degree of Athena
layering they have.  Suppose, for example, you are a support organization
for, say, DEC workstations.  The customer can buy a workstation and install
all the software himself and ignore you except for maybe name server
entry and network hookup.  Or the customer can buy a workstation and
sign up with you to install and configure the software and make the mail
work initially.  He could also sign up for an ongoing service that will
install updates and fixes as they come from the vendor.  What he gets
could be anything from a vendor-pure system to a complete Athena package
with some number of layers in between.

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