The Repository Bootstrapping RPM Migration from TINT Building RPMS Reporting Problems Background UNIX traditionally has a lot of software you don't need, but probably want, that is not supplied by the UNIX vendor.
Examples are emacs, bash,and perl.
The difficulty of installing and configuring all this additional software on a large number of hosts has led to the pursuit of automated software distribution systems associated with repositories of additional software. At this point, we only have this problem on Solaris systems. Rutgers has gone through several software distribution systems. At this point OSS and some other groups support RPM , which is the system used by many commercial Linux distributions. A comparison of different software distribution systems is past the scope of this document.