Cannot find source for UPG-TLINK (or UPG-TLINK2)

[Bill Barto]

I am upgrading my version of IBM/Rational ClearCase on an HP-UX 11iv3 (11.31) system (Itanium architecture). The ClearCase upgrade requirements say that we must have the UPG-TLINK package and for systems running 11.23 or later, we also are supposed to have the UPG-TLINK2 package.

I understand this package to be various transitional links to the file system for when the disk layout was changed. Are these still available (somewhere) for 11.31?

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

11.31 now has transition links built in.
The program tlinstall is no longer provided after 11.23.

You can verify that the links are installed like this:

# ll -d /bin
lr-xr-xr-x   1 bin        bin              8 Oct 31 14:54 /bin -> /usr/bin

These links are legacy connections to an older filesystem layout from pre-10.xx versions of HP-UX.

[Patrick Wallek]

The UPG2-TLINK file set no longer exists in HP-UX 11.31 / 11iv3, and as a result the file 'tlinstall' no longer exists either.

As Bill said, the 'transition links', which were supposed to be temporary links when moving from the HP-UX 9.x layout to 10.x and newer, have apparently been made permanent.  The links are no longer denoted with a 't' in the permissions like they were with 11.23 and previous versions.

If the software is expecting a UPG2-TLINK fileset in HP-UX 11.31, then they likely will never find it.  That requirement needs to go away and they just need to check to make sure the apporpriate links have been created.

[Bill Barto]

Thanks for the definitive answer. I suspected that UPG-TLINK was obsolete, but I couldn't find anything on the web or here on HPE's pages to state that clearly.

[Bill Hassell]

This is what the old transition links looked like:

# ll -d /bin
lr-xr-xr-t   1 root       sys              8 Aug  8  2017 /bin -> /usr/bin

They were created more than 25 years ago as a helper for old applications and scripts that used the SysV.3 filesystem layout. In this layout, there is a /bin directory. But starting with HP-UX version 10.0, the filesystem layout used the SysV.4 layout where /bin became /usr/bin. 

Oops. Lots of programs and scripts stopped working. So transistion links were created so that /bin would appear (and hundreds of other SysV.3 directories. It was announced at that time that transition links were temporary and would be removed in the future (hence the name transition). 

Along came version 11.00 and subsequent releases...same warning. Finally, with 11.31, the links became permanent. This was due to the massive effort needed by thousands of software creators to rewrite all their code. The permanent status was mentioned in one of the 11.31 Release notes that also documented the removal of tlinstall. A lot of docs for releases older than 11.31 are disappearing from HP's websites. I did find this note in man chmod on an 11.31 system:

 config_cleanup_cmd=/usr/lbin/sw/config_clean
                     Defines the script called by the agent to perform
                     release-specific configure cleanup steps.
                     Please Note:  Transition links do not exist on 11.31
                     and newer releases so there are no configure cleanup
                     steps to perform therefore the config_cleanup_cmd is
                     never executed for these releases.

As you might imagine, IBM (and Oracle and SAP, etc) do not rewrite their instructions for every change made in HP-UX. My guess is that the note for ClearCase is at least 10 years old.