Lots of good responses to your question. VMLINK is so much better than OBTAIN which Dave Boyes mentioned.
At most (all?) of the shops where I have worked, there has been at least some use of the minidisk-per-tool model, even a different minidisk for each release of a given tool or package. Record the VMID and minidisk address in VMLINK NAMES and it should work very smoothly. You can (should) write and EXEC to front-end the most relevant commands in the package so it is automatic and then put that on the 319 or 31A disk or some such. What I like about it is that it isolates the software as shipped from both user space and from other packages as well as from the O/S. (One of Melinda's rules: don't co-mingle the O/S and third party stuff.) Windows and Unix mess things up: They tend to install everything together. Windows at least now has "C:\Program Files" and Unix has /opt. But the implementation doesn't seem to be well understood. In Unix, there may be a "wrapper" or a sym-link in /usr/local/bin that enables each package, if they are not installed mixed together. Our "wrapper EXECs" on VM to do the link & access part are similar. ADD TO ALL THIS the Unix (and Linux) concept of an automounter. Put tools on a disk or directory that is mounted on-the-fly, quite like we do things in VM land with link & access on-the-fly. If more tools were installed this way, then upgrades would be much smoother. You could even let more than one release of a given software package co-exist on the same system. VMLINK is really slick. It robustly handles RELEASE and DETACH. Correlation to Unix is that automounter should unmount unused disks or directories. (It tries silently. Very nice.) -- R;
