Chapter 12. Packaging your applications

If your applications are only executed on the systems where you are developing and debugging, no software installation is required. However, applications are most likely developed on development and test systems, then installed on production systems.

The software installation tasks are commonly performed by customers or other people who might not have enough knowledge about your applications. Even if you have prepared the detailed software installation instruction for your applications, there is no guarantee that those people follow your instruction; you have no control where they try to install your applications.

By creating your application packages, the required conditions, such as supported operating system software levels and adequate physical memory size for your applications, will be enforced.

This chapter provides the following sections to explain how to package your applications for AIX:

• Section 12.1, “Understanding the AIX standard packaging” on page 406

• Section 12.2, “Packaging applications using mkinstallp” on page 418