\chapter{Introduction}

Computers are becoming more and more complex, more and more
interconnected and have an ever-increasing amount of software
installed and configured.  In this paper, I will research one way
to handle the problem of managing the installed software and growing
number of hosts.

This text requires a good knowledge of \unix-based operating systems
and concepts.  The text has been kept short while still being
informative.  The intended audience is developers of packaging systems
and others with similar interests.  The choice of English rather than
Norwegian is due to the small size of the community and based on a
goal that this article will help software distribution systems handle
scalability problems better.  The use of the personal pronoun ``he''
is only to avoid writing he/she as it interrupts the flow when
reading.  There are both female sysadmins and developers out there and
it is not my intention to belittle them in any way.

The paper is written in a net-centric, open source/free software
paradigm where there is a strong tradition of using \abbrev{irc},
blogs and email for development of ideas rather than the traditional
academic paper.  Many of the sources used through the paper are not
formally published and are therefore left out of the list of
references.

\section{Delimitations}

Making a generalised solution for all systems under the sun is, if
possible, extremely hard.  Also, rather than making a
``one-size-fits-none'' kind of solution, I will concentrate on a
solution for \unix and \unix-like operating systems (like Linux).  Those
are similar enough that that they will be treated as variants rather
than different operating systems.  Other paradigms like Microsoft
Windows and \vms will need other kinds of solutions, which will not be
researched here.
