Networking Guide
Chapter 19, Installing and managing software over the network

About the new product structure

About the new product structure

Under the new structure, each SCO product is arranged in the following units:

product
The unit of software that you buy. For example, SCO OpenServer Enterprise System and Microsoft LAN Manager are products. Each product has its own version number. A product is composed of one or more ``components'', ``packages'', or ``parcels''.

A patch-product in the SCO OpenServer Handbook is one or more patches distributed as a product.

component
The smallest unit of software that can stand alone. A component can constitute an entire product, or it can be one of many components in a product, but it cannot be split into smaller units for distribution. Each component has its own version number. A component is organized into a hierarchical tree of ``packages''.

A patch in the SCO OpenServer Handbook is applied to a component (rather than to a product or package).

package
The smallest unit of software that can be installed or removed. Each package consists either of files or of other packages. A package does not have its own version number; it inherits the version number of its parent component.

In addition to these units, a product might be subdivided into ``parcels''. In a parcel, related software is grouped for convenience. For example, a parcel might contain the documentation packages from several components, making it easier to install or remove all the documentation in a product. A parcel can contain one or more components, packages, or parcels from the product.

The basis of the new product structure is the concept of software storage objects (SSOs), a method for arranging and naming the files in a distribution so that each component starts out as a read-only object in a unique directory. Each component is completely contained within an SSO, and each SSO contains only one component. Arranging a product in storage objects makes the following features possible:

See also: