CMU Depot Design Points

• By default, Depot made symbolic links to all files in a package directory. If we didn't want a particular file or directory to be linked, we had to explicitly configure Depot to ignore that file or directory. This was a significant administrative burden. opt_depot by default only links files under the bin, lib, include, info, and man directories. In addition, opt_depot contains specific intelligence for handling man directories.
• Depot insisted on controlling everything in the local installation directory. If a file was directly installed in (in our case) /opt/bin, Depot would remove the file. There was no easy way to get around Depot's rigidity of operation.
• Depot was hard to configure and control, with a confusing set of configuration files.
• Depot had no convenient mechanism for doing package sharing in an NFS environment. Depot in general is oriented more around an AFS environment.
• Depot did cleaning and updating in one step, and thus had a higher overhead when simply installing a new package.

On the other hand, even the version of Depot of three years ago had some features that opt_depot does not, including options for copying files into place rather than using symbolic links, and examining the modification times of files to determine if updating for a particular file was necessary.

The latest Depot has some interesting new features, particularly the ability to perform an operation on a file as it is copied or linked, such as uncompressing or detarring.

opt_depot page

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