depot

[Indrajit Bhagat]

what is software depot ? what is the difference between swcopy and swinstall?

Thanks in advance to all of you who spent few time for me to reply.

[Mridul Shrivastava · Accepted solution]

depot can be created or downloaded if we are planning to install more than one patch in a one go....
So you can say depot is combination of more than one patch.
swcopy is being used to copy the software.. it's not recommended to use cp command for copying the software from one location to other.... So if we have more than one patch to install we will use swcopy to copy all the patches at one location and create depot.
Then swinstall can be used to install those patches.. so swinstall is used to install any kind of software..

[Bob E Campbell]

Depots come in two styles. A tape or serial depot exists as a single file, usually given the ".depot" suffix. These depots are easy to transfer outside of SD-UX (using ssh or ftp for example), but can only be used with swinstall if they in the local filesystem.

A network or directory depot exists as a directory tree with the content existing as files within that tree. These depots can be used over networks by the swinstall and swcopy commands.

All depots are originally created using the swpackage command (by the software developers). Once a depot exists it can be copied to a serial depot (using swpackage) or another network depot (using swcopy).

At this time only a single depot can be used during a swinstall session, but that depot can contain multiple bundles. I have a very simple set of slides I have used in past presentations that might help, but you must read up. SD is a very powerful set of tools, which is the same as saying it is very complex.