Companies which use lots of developement tools (say semi-conductor or visual effects companies) typically end up using many different versions of their tools as developement processes evolve. Managing this process from both the sysadmin's and developers point of view quickly becomes painful. Fortunately there are tools to help you manage this:
- Environment Modules
- (Recommended by Bill Ryder) The Modules package allows you to dynamically modify a user's environment via modulefiles. Each modulefile contains the information needed to configure the shell for an application. Once the Modules package is initialized, the environment can be modified on a per-module basis. Typically, modulefiles instruct the module command to alter or set shell environment variables such as PATH, MANPATH, etc. modulefiles may be shared by many users on a system and users may have their own collection to supplement or replace the shared modulefiles. The modules environment is common on SGI/Crays and many workstation farms.
- GNU Stow
- GNU Stow is a program for managing the installation of software packages, keeping them separate (/usr/local/stow/emacs vs. /usr/local/stow/perl, for example) while making them appear to be installed in the same place (/usr/local). Stow is a Perl script which should run correctly under Perl 5.005 and above. You must install Perl before running Stow. Stow was inspired by Carnegie Mellon's Depot program, but is substantially simpler.
- SEPP
- Writtten by Tobias Oetiker.