Multiple Versions

SD-UX supports installing multiple revisions of the same software on a system at the same time, if the software supports it. By using multiple installed versions, recovery can be supported at the system or task (all systems) level.

Installing a second version requires some careful planning, as well as understanding how to identify multiple versions on the system.

Each product has a product directory attribute. The installed location on the target is by default the same as the product directory. For example, a product Foo might have a product directory of /opt/foo. You can list the locations of installed software with:

swlist -l product -a location

or

swlist -l product -a software_spec

A common practice is to install a second version of the product. When installing this software, a new location must be selected. In the case of the product Foo, the new location might be /opt/foo.v2. After specifying the new location (i.e., by adding l=/opt/foo.v2 after the product tag in the GUI or CLI), swinstall will replace the product directory portion of all files with the new product location.

	NOTE: The allow_multiple_versions option must be set to true for swinstall to install multiple versions of the software. The new version will not be configured by swinstall if there is another version configured.

After a second version has been installed, each version can be identified either by the location (Foo,l=/opt/foo and Foo,l=/opt/foo.v2), by the revision (Foo,r=1.0 and Foo,r=2.0), or both. You can list the locations and revisions of all versions with:

swlist -l fileset -a location -a revision

Additionally, you can list a fully qualified software spec containing both the location and revision as well as the other version distinguishing attributes (vendor and architecture) with:

swlist -l fileset -a software_spec

After the new version is installed successfully for all products or on all hosts, the old version can be unconfigured, and the new version configured as the active version by using swconfig -u with the old version and swconfig with the new version.

	NOTE: By default, only one version of the software is allowed to be configured at a time.

The second version can not be configured until the first one is unconfigured. As was discussed in “Installation With Separate Configuration”, installing a second version automatically excludes configuring the new version.

You must manually unconfigure the old version, then configure the new version. If the software supports multiple configured versions (in addition to multiple installed versions) the swconfig.allow_multiple_versions option can be set to true.

In case of any problems, the old version can be restored as the active version by unconfiguring the new version and reconfiguring the old (i.e., by swconfig -u with the new version and swconfig with the old version).

In order to support multiple versions, the software must be structured so that all files are below the product directory, and the configure scripts need to be written with multiple version support in mind. In a simple example, the configure script could add a symbolic link from /usr/bin/foo to $SW_LOCATION/bin/foo, and the unconfigure script could remove that link. In this example, configuring and unconfiguring each version of this software is easily done.

	NOTE: The use of allow_multiple_versions=true command option and the l=<alternate location> software specification is not supported when updating HP-UX to a new version.