We initially considered providing either a set of bundles (which would contain
maybe a dozen parent packages and all their dependencies) or a remote software
depot containing all of the filesets, but both solutions would involve a
consider amount of extra filestore (and coding to auto-update them as
necessary).
However, HP-UX ships with ftp, gzcat, ksh, and Software Distributor commands (swlist, swinstall, swremove) as standard, which is enough to write a script to use FTP to download a list of packages and their dependencies provided for the stated OS and architecture (you can see the compressed lists for each OS version/architecture here) and even cope with an FTP proxy whilst doing so.
Once the package list becomes available, it's then straightforward to get a list of installed packages with swlist and then perform a variety of tasks such as listing, downloading, installing and/or uninstalling packages and their dependencies with a single command.
You can now download this script, known as depothelper, and use it to easily manage the HP-UX archive depots on your system. It can even auto-update itself if it detects a new version of depothelper is available!
