AIX

Hi,

I am a newbie here:

Can any one suggest me how to install a bff package to a desired location on an AIX box? I checked the man page for installp, it does not seem to have this information(Did I miss it?) for installing a package to a directory of user's choice.

Thanks for any help regarding this.

Depending on what installp is supposed to do by the package creator changing the destination might be a bad idea. However in case no scripting action is involved, e.g. just plain filesets in the package you could simply use restore to extract the backup format file and move the filesets then. You won't be able to reject, uninstall, update the package with installp later though, if you treat the installation like a tarball.

Thanks for your reply.

I have one more question. How do I package it in such a way on AIX, so that the destination can be changed at install time.

For example, on solaris this can be handled by one of the packaging scripts "request"

Similarly, rpm seems to have a prefix option for installing the package to a desired location on linux and on HPUX machines too, the request script can be used while installing a depot to instruct where the package should get installed.

Can this be handled on AIX?? Do we have one such packaging script which instructs the .bff file at installation time to install the package to a specific location?

-JStone.

Yes. Simply create your package with RPM. RPM is one out of three packaging formats that are supported by AIX. Only prereq: rpm.rte must be installed (comes free with the OS and should be installed by default).

Nice source for starting building rpm packages: Maximum RPM Taking the Red Hat Package Manager to the Limit

Thanks for detailing me about this. Could you also please share what is the other packaging format supported by AIX? (bff, rpm, ??)

Install Shield MultiPlatform ISMP formated packages is the third.

You might find this link helpful:
pSeries and AIX Information Center

Thanks for the information about the multi platform installer. If I remember correctly, InstallAnyWhere has taken its position and doing this job for creating cross platform installers.

I still wonder if there is a way to package the bff with a choice to install it to a specific directory.

Thanks for all the detailed info and for clarifying using rpm on AIX machines.