Slackware Linux Essentials
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Chapter 18 Slackware Package -Management

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Table of Contents
18.1 Overview of -Package Format
18.2 Package Utilities
18.3 Making Packages
18.4 Making Tags and -Tagfiles (for setup)

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A software package is a bundle of related programs that are ready for you to install. -When you download a source code archive, you have to configure, compile, and install it -by hand. With a software package, this has already been done for you. All that you have -to do is install the package. Another handy feature of using software packages is that it -is very easy to remove and upgrade them, if you so desire. Slackware comes with programs -for all your package management needs. You can install, remove, upgrade, make, and -examine packages very easily.

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There's a myth that's been going around ever since RedHat debuted RedHat Package -Manager, that Slackware has no package management tool. This simply couldn't be further -from the truth. Slackware has always included a package manager, even before RedHat -existed. While not as full-featured or as ubiquitous as rpm (or for that matter deb), pkgtool and its associated programs are every bit as good at -installing packages as rpm. The truth about pkgtool is not that -it doesn't exist, but that it doesn't do any dependency checking.

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Apparently many people in the Linux community think that a packager manager must by -definition include dependency checking. Well, that simply isn't the case, as Slackware -most certainly does not. This is not to say that Slackware packages don't have -dependencies, but rather that its package manager doesn't check for them. Dependency -management is left up to the sysadmin, and that's the way we like it.

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18.1 Overview of Package Format

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Before learning the utilities, you should become familiar with the format of a -Slackware package. In Slackware, a package is simply a tar archive file that has been -compressed with gzip. Packages are built to be extracted in the -root directory.

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Here is a fictitious program and its example package:

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-./
-usr/
-usr/bin/
-usr/bin/makehejaz
-usr/doc/
-usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/
-usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/COPYING
-usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/README
-usr/man/
-usr/man/man1
-usr/man/man1/makehejaz.1.gz
-install/
-install/doinst.sh
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The package system will extract this file in the root directory to install it. An -entry in the package database will be created that contains the contents of this package -so that it can be upgraded or removed later.

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Notice the install/ subdirectory. This is a special -directory that can contain a postinstallation script called doinst.sh. If the package system finds this file, it will execute -it after installing the package.

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Other scripts can be embedded in the package, but those are discussed more in detail -in Section -18.3.2 below.

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