Introduction

Our main objective is to enable incremental installation, uninstallation and upgrade of the FrameKit platform. This procedure must also allow any FrameKit administrator to perform incremental installation, uninstallation and upgrade of any tool inside any environment built on top of FrameKit without having to be "root".

To achieve this goal, the FrameKit installation and uninstallation procedure is performed by a specific tool : admin_kit.

Kit, the Instalation Component

Our distribution approach is based on the kit notion. A kit is an installation component that contains elements. There are three types of kits:

• Platform kits contain executable and data of the FrameKit platform,
• Formalism kits contain all the required information to insert a new formalism in an installed FrameKit platform;
• Tool kits contain all the required information to install a tool (and its associated set of services) in a an installed Framekit platform for an installed formalism.

Kits are nammed and are associated to a target architecture (hardware + OS). Platform kits are associated with a target architecture but not with a formalism. Formalisms may not be associated to a target architecture (if there is not related executable file for verification). Tool kits are associated with both a target architecture and a formalism.

Installation Strategy

Figure 1 presents an example of this strategy. Let us imagine a web site in which there are:

• two platform kits (for architecture archi_1 and archi_2) and a formalism kit (not related to any architecture) coming from development site 1;
• tool kits for tool 1 asociated to the available formalism and available for architectures archi_1 and archi_2 coming from development site 2;
• tool kit for tool 2, only available for architecture archi_1 coming from development site 3.

Figure 1: Development and distribution strategy of FrameKit.

Let us imagine a client who wants to install a FrameKit based environment about this available formalism for archi_1. He only has to instll the required tools for the required architecture. If, later on, he buy archi_2 hardwarde, he may upgrade his environment with kits for this new architecture. Upgrade of tools, formalisms and platform may be performed as well: the new kit is the only item to import and install.

So, this procedure allows an "à la carte" installation by any user. It also allow a distributed kit development all over Internet.

Packages

To ease the life of somebody who wants to download a full and coherent configuration without having to get kits one by one. It is possible to get packages. A package is a tar file that contains a predefined set of packages. You download it, you untar it and apply the installation procedure as explained in the READ_ME file you get in it.

Click here to get more information about packages.