
                 Discussion of UNIMAINT Groups

An UNIMAINT Group is a set of Applications in a specific INI file that
has been formed and named by the user and is used as a convenient way
to manipulate the contents of the INI file. Without some way to form
subsets of all of the Applications in an INI file, the only way to
manipulate it is either Application by Application, which can be
tedious, or by using the entire file, which provides no flexibility.
Since one of the objectives of UNIMAINT is to give the user an easy way
to create backups of all or part of his INI files and to provide an
easy way to restore an INI file, neither level of manipulation is
satisfactory.

UNIMAINT solves this problem by giving the user the ability relate a
set of Applications together into a Group. Forming the Group does not
change the Application information in the INI file, it simply creates
an additional Application in the file that describes the Groups that
the user has formed. Once the Groups are created, then the Group name
can be used in UNIMAINT operations and all the Applications in the
Group will be included.

For example, many users install a number of programs that put entries
into the standard User INI file, normally OS2.INI. If there is a
problem with the environment, something happens to the INI files or
some other problem arises that clobbers the INI entries, then the only
recovery is to re-customize all of these applications. If the user were
to put all of these Applications into a Group called 'My Applications',
then he would not have this problem. The My Applications Group could be
backed up to a backup INI file at any time using the INICOPY program as
follows:

INICOPY -IC:\OS2\OS2.INI -OC:\OS2\MYAPPS.INI -G"My Applications"

The above assumes the normal name and location for the INI files. The
name of the Group must be enclosed in ""'s if it contains any blanks or
the Command Processor will split it into two different command line
entries and INICOPY will return an error.

The same Group could be restored to the User INI file as follows:

INICOPY -OC:\OS2\OS2.INI -IC:\OS2\MYAPPS.INI -G"My Applications"

In other words, simply reverse the Input and Output filenames.

It is intended that this same approach can be used to keep multiple
physical computers in synch with each other. Right now, if the user has
multiple systems, he must customize every installed application on
every system. You cannot move the INI files from one system to another,
since there is a lot of information in the INI files that is system
specific. Using UNIMAINT, this process is made much easier, since the
target INI file can be on a diskette and, even if there are some minor
differences between the systems such as drive letters or something like
that, UNIMAINT can be used to make modifications to the contents of the
transfer INI file before it is copied to the new system. This does not
need to be limited to installation situations. One possible approach
would be to form an Applications Group and, whenever any significant
change is made to any application, the changes can be transferred to
the other systems. In fact, there is not reason, assuming the user had
many systems and a LAN, that a separate transfer INI file could not be
set up for every application, have it updated from a central source
whenever a significant change is made and have a CMD file on individual
client systems that would use the transfer INI files just for the
applications installed on that system.

