slapt-get

slapt-get copied to clipboard

Copyright (C) 2003-2024 Jason Woodward

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Table of Contents:

1. Features

2. Requirements

3. Installation

4. slapt-getrc

5. Getting started

6. Troubleshooting

7. Thanks and contributions

8. Features

   slapt-get tries to emulate Debian's apt-get as closely as possible.

   • uses native Slackware tools (installpkg, upgradepkg, and removepkg)
   • supports packages as tgz, tlz, tbz, and txz files
   • supports multiple package sources with the ability to assign priorities to each source.
   • cache data concerning packages and updates from package sources
   • supports sources from ftp, ftps, http, https, file:/// and more (libcurl)
   • resumes broken downloads and will verify package integrity with MD5 checksum
   • show packages that are available (from cached data) and installed
   • search package listing using POSIX and extended regular expressions by package name, location, and description
   • retrieve, install, and remove packages by name or by specific version
   • retrieve and apply updates
   • upgrade from one Slackware release to another in a few simple steps
   • show description of packages, including mirror location, version, size, dependencies (where available), conflicts (where available), suggestions (where available), description, installation status, and the package changelog entry (where available).
   • exclude (hold) packages from upgrades, by name or by regular expression
   • transaction engine for install, remove, and upgrades, reporting concise information on what is to be done, ensuring each step happens correctly
   • "compare package version" algorithm to prevent downgrades
   • recursive dependency resolution using slack-required meta-data (see FAQ) supporting hard, soft, and conditional dependencies
   • package conflict resolution using slack-conflicts meta-data (see FAQ)
   • package suggestion support for complimentary packages (see FAQ)
   • Package data download robustness, only writing changes if all sources download successfully as well as only downloading those sources that have changed since the last download
   • i18n support via GNU gettext with over 30 language translations
   • extremely fast and easy to script with

9. Requirements

   slapt-get requires Slackware-9.0 or better, due to glibc and openssl updates. You can also use slapt-get under Slackware 8.1 if you upgrade glibc-solibs and openssl from Slackware 9.0, or if slapt-get is built statically linked.

   The following packages are required to build slapt-get from source: make, gcc, curl, glibc, kernel-headers, binutils, zlib, gettext-tools, and openssl.

   If gpgpme is installed, slapt-get can be built with support for signature verification with gnupg. gpgme requires libgpg-error.

   The unit tests in t/ require check (http://check.sourceforge.net/).

10. Installation

    You can install via meson or make (deprecated).

    • Meson

      meson setup build # or any dir of your choosing meson compile -C build # or ninja -C build for older meson releases meson install -C build # or ninja -C build install for older meson releases

      Meson/ninja supports DESTDIR=/path meson install -C build

      TIP: slapt-get.Slackbuild will create a Slackware package. Run with sudo or as a privileged user.

    • make (deprecated)

      make make install # as privileged user

      The Makefile honors DESTDIR.

      TIP: make pkg (as privileged user) will create a Slackware package.

11. slapt-getrc

    The slapt-getrc file consists currently of the following keys: SOURCE WORKINGDIR EXCLUDE

    Choose a mirror from the slackware.com mirror list at http://www.slackware.com/getslack/

    • SOURCE must be a path to a valid Slackware release directory, or a third party source (see example within rc). All that is required is the PACKAGES.TXT (see FAQ entry #17) and CHECKSUMS.md5. Multiple sources can be defined.

      NOTE: It is not recommended to mix 3rd party package sources with the official on production servers. Sometimes third party sources contain the same packages as the official mirrors. Third party packages might not be as rigorously tested as official packages.

    Each SOURCE can be a assigned a priority level, by appending :{PRIORITY} to the source URI. For example:

    SOURCE={url}:DEFAULT is the default, lowest priority SOURCE={url}:PREFERRED assigns more weight to this source SOURCE={url}:OFFICIAL even more weight, used to denote official sources SOURCE={url}:CUSTOM highest priority, for your custom package source

    See the FAQ for more information.

    • WORKINGDIR will hold the package data and downloaded packages. This directory will be created automatically as permissions allow.

    • EXCLUDE is a comma separated list of packages you want excluded from updating. This can be the package name, or a extended POSIX regex. For example, to exclude Dropline, use .*-[0-9]dl$. See regex(7).

12. Getting started

    After installing and customizing the slapt-getrc configuration file, you need to run slapt-get with the --update option to download the package data available from all the package sources you specified within the slapt-getrc file.

    Once this is done, you can use the following options:

    • --upgrade to upgrade your installed packages.
    • --dist-upgrade to upgrade to a newer release (Please refer to the FAQ concerning dist-upgrade prior to running the command).
    • --search to locate packages of interest by the package name, disk set, or version. This supports POSIX and extended regular expressions.
    • --install to install a package. If the package is already installed it will be upgraded.
    • --list to see all the packages available from the package sources you specified within the slapt-getrc configuration file.
    • --installed to list all the packages you already have installed.
    • --remove to remove packages.
    • --show to show information about packages.
    • --clean to remove all downloaded packages from the local cache.
    • --autoclean to remove packages from local cache that are no longer available on the package sources specified in the slapt-getrc file.
    • --remove-obsolete along with --remove or --dist-upgrade will mark all non-downloadable packages for removal.

13. Troubleshooting

Probably some bugs. Email bug reports to me: Jason Woodward

or file a github issue: https://github.com/jaos/slapt-get/issues

Make sure --update is ran once initially and the data file (package_data) is good.

Some mirrors are incomplete and the downloaded file is actually HTML specifying the web servers error message. MD5 checking has been incorporated in order to alleviate this problem.

Please do not add redundant mirror locations to the same release. Mirror fall back is not implemented (see FAQ #50). Also, any time the source url(s) are changed, slapt-get --update must be run to update the local cache.

If you are getting segfaults, add -g to CFLAGS in the Makefile, change the DEBUG define in src/main.h to 1, and rebuild ( make clean && make ). Run in gdb and let me know via email where the fault happens.

Run the test suite and report any failing tests to github issues.

See the FAQ for more info.

7. Thanks and contributions

John Babiak is the VectorLinux slapt-get maintainer.

Big thanks to Dan Barber for his insight and help with documentation suggestions and feature requests.

Thanks to James Simmons over at linuxpackages.net for his interest, support, and ideas.

nixon and simon authored the Polish translation. With updates by Paul Blazejowski , and Piotr Simon .

Arnaldo de Moraes Pereira authored the Brazilian Portuguese translation. Updates from Sergio Surkamp.

Michiel H. authored the Dutch translation.

Joran Kvalvaag authored the Norwegian translation.

Ruben authored the Latin American and Spanish translations. Angelos updated.

Francesco Gigli authored the Italian translation.

Joel Bjurman authored the Swedish translation.

Savvas Efstratiadis authored the Greek translation.

Niklas Volbers authored the German translation.

Oto Petrik <oto.petrik at centrum dot cz > authored the Czech translation.

Piotr Simon created the HTML version of the FAQ.

Miguel Santinho <info at Simplicidade dot com> authored the Portuguese_Portugal translation with updates by Sérgio Marques and Hugo Carvalho .

Vu Nguyen (vncasper at yahoo dot com) authored the Vietnamese translation.

publikum at users dot sourceforge dot net authored the Slovenian translation.

Verachten Bruno authored the French translation.

freerock contributed the DESTDIR support for the makefile.

Erik Gyepes contributed the Slovak translation.

sin of the DeepStyle team contributed the Russian and Unkrainian translations, with updates from .

Victor Keranov <victor_keranov at mail dot bg> contributed the Bulgarian translation.

Kemas Antonius contributed the Indonesian translation.

S_A contributed the Japanese translation.

Yang Jinsong contributed the simplified Chinese translation.

Bekir SONAT contributed the Turkish translation.

Reteaua PTM contributed the Romanian translation.

Ken Milmore contributed the initial source priority support.

Anders F Bjorklund contributed the slapt_pkg_t_filelist() support.

Vitaly Chernookiy <vitaly.v.ch at gmail dot com> contributed the initial cross compiling support

Other translators credited within the translation source files.