Beginning with DMF 2.8, DMF no longer supports multiple installed versions of DMF that can be made active via the dmmaint(8) program. While it is not necessary to delete any existing pre-2.8 versions of DMF, they will not accessible by the DMF 2.8 or later software and they can be removed at the convenience of the administrator.

The reason for this change is that the pre-2.8 DMF directory hierarchy of /usr/dmf/dmbase is no longer the target installation directory of DMF. Rather, DMF 2.8 and later binaries, libraries, header files, and man pages are installed directly into the proper system locations and they are accessed directly from those locations without the use of symbolic file links.

When DMF 2.8 or later is installed, if the symbolic file link /etc/dmf/dmbase exists, it will be deleted. This link was used in pre-2.8 versions of DMF to access the “active” version of DMF, and as such, it was part of the administrators' initialization procedure to add this link to their PATH environment variable. Since it is no longer used in DMF 2.8 and later versions, it could cause an incorrect copy of a DMF command to be executed if an administrator's path included the link to be searched before the normal system binary locations. This way, even if the administrator neglects to remove the link from the path, it should not make any difference.