I once had to deliver multiple DB Catia environments to multiple groups of designers's PCs. We used a chained series of Novell (as was) Zenworks apps (bundles these days). The environments are largely defined through env vars.
So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code, followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand, followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around.
I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?) I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised constraints.
As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.
Yup, a lot of things show when you use software that was first released from 1998. The first company I worked for that used catia has about 10 seats. A special sysadmin we hired that specialized in CAD admin wrote a special powershell script to set everything up. He was awesome and taught me how to write my own vba macros. I now work for a major automaker and they have these precompiled binaries that does everything for you. It’s kinda crazy to think you need a team of engineers to write and maintain an in house codebase just to make sure everything is installed correctly.
So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code, followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand, followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around.
I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?) I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised constraints.
As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.