What is/was `yinst`?

I recently found myself reading over the old npm FAQ (it was removed several years ago; see #10547 and came across the following section:If 'npm' is an acronym, why is it never capitalized?Contrary to the belief of many, "npm" is not in fact an abbreviation for "Node Package Manager". It is a recursive bacronymic abbreviation for "npm is not an acronym". (If it was "ninaa", then it would be an acronym, and thus incorrectly named.)"NPM", however, is an acronym (more precisely, a capitonym) for the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. You can learn more about them at http://npm.org/.In software, "NPM" is a Non-Parametric Mapping utility written by Chris Rorden. You can analyze pictures of brains with it. Learn more about the (capitalized) NPM program at http://www.cabiatl.com/mricro/npm/.The first seed that eventually grew into this flower was a bash utility named "pm", which was a shortened descendent of "pkgmakeinst", a bash function that was used to install various different things on different platforms, most often using Yahoo's yinst. If npm was ever an acronym for anything, it was node pm or maybe new pm.So, in all seriousness, the "npm" project is named after its command-line utility, which was organically selected to be easily typed by a right-handed programmer using a US QWERTY keyboard layout, ending with the right-ring-finger in a postition to type the - key for flags and other command-line arguments. That command-line utility is always lower-case, though it starts most sentences it is a part of.According to the fourth paragraph, there is/was a utility named yinst somewhere out there. What is/was it and what's the story behind it?

Submitted May 25, 2020 at 06:29AM by mjbmitch