[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Friday, June 10, 2016 at 4:43:50 AM UTC+12, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> Conversely, tell me about what's good about Windows or Windows Server 
> or Linux and whether those advantages can work or can be reasonably be 
> implemented in OpenVMS or applications, or can move OpenVMS sales 
> forward, and then I'm interested.

Package management would be an obvious thing:

    ldo at theon:~> echo I have $(dpkg-query -l | grep -c ^i) packages installed.
    I have 4571 packages installed.

The package system keeps track of where everything goes, and what their dependencies are. And it only takes a one-line command to keep everything up-to-date.

There are some things I build from source myself, because packages aren’t available in Debian or are too old. By default these install themselves in /usr/local, quite separate from the standard packages.

So you see, there are long-established conventions to keep things from running into each other. At least for open-source software...