hi,
have u tried swaret and slapt-get? it handles slackware's package installation easier.
erik
Not yet, but that is exactly the point of the post, that under Slackware, I find that installing/uninstalling from do-it-yourself packages made from source .tar.gz is so straightforward such that additional tools only serve to make things more complicated, not to mention introduce potential new headaches..
Ariz Jacinto wrote:
hmmm...., does slackware has its own version of configure script?
No. But the vast majority of source now comes with well written configure scripts which make using them in conjunction with Slackware's simple yet effective package manager effortless. (See my old 2002-09-27 plug post 'short and sweet slackware package tutorial' for how to do it)
rpm and deb pkg mngr does the same thing, unless if the files are generated by the pre/post install pkg mngr script and the package maintainer forgot/fails to remove those files thru the pre/post uninstall pkg mngr script.
So far, for all the slackpacks I've made myself, there have been no need to create any install/uninstall scripts at all. Once in possession of the binary slackware package (a .tgz tarball), you only need to know two commands:
'installpkg packagename.tgz' and 'removepkg packagename'. The first copies files over, the other one removes whatever it copied over in the first place. Iirc, even when I upgraded from gcc 2.95 to gcc 3.1, I did not have to write an install/uninstall script.
What about the dependencies, you ask? I think it's got something to do with the state of Linux today and how things have stabilized that dependency worries are much less common nowadays - everyone has standardized on a core set of libraries and tools that are present in any decently put together distro (or maybe it's just that Slackware's creators made excellent default choices).
Despite the lack of automated dependency checking, I have NEVER found myself needing it. I have had to install multiple packages which SDL depended on for extra functionality (SMPEG, Freetype, etc...), and all of it has been painless. Hmmm... maybe I'm becoming a Linux old hand after all... but guess what, I haven't gotten around to learning bash scripting to this day!!! (Mainly because I've never really needed it... go figure...)
i haven't seen it yet but honestly speaking, i really hate seeing the symlinks scattered all over the dir tree of RH,DEB,MDK distro.
Symlinks are a fact of life in unix, but of course the less there are the cleaner. I don't know about other distros, but I now understand Slackware's directory philosophy (it follows the Linux File Hierarchy Standard) that I no longer worry about orphaned links.
There's just a couple of rules of thumb you need to remember: Always invoke your configure script so that all the stuff you install gets put in /usr/local (libs, binaries, docs, etc...). 99% of the time, this is as simple as doing ./configure --prefix=/usr/local (or some slight variation if the developer did not use autoconf).
Because /usr/local/bin is what's in the path, if you notice that the install script for your package puts its binaries in usr/local/package-name/bin instead of usr/local/bin, just create symlinks from usr/local/bin to it.
IMPORTANT: Make the symlink in the package creation directory BEFORE you create the package, NOT AFTER, so the symlink becomes part of and gets removed along with the pacakage. So far, symlinks to binaries are the only thing I've needed to create, there have been no problem with libs.
Example:
While inside /pkgcreate/usr/local/packagename/bin, do ln -s binaryname ../../bin/binaryname
Anyway, the nice thing with the Slackware package manager is that if anything goes wrong, removepkg will cleanly undo everything without keeping any additional turd files or meta-info lying around.
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