question(s) concerning SlackBuild scripts
 

Hi all -

I recently started looking into creating a couple of SlackBuild scripts for my own use and (should they work!) submission to slackbuilds.com. Seems not only fun but right instructive-like. :)

Now, my understanding of the section on "Setting Up Your Build Environment" part of the tutorial re: how to do this on SlackWiki is that the build environment _must_ include the source code for the relevant release of Slack _in its entirety_ ... is that correct? I just want to (cough) make sure because, my machine being the multi-boot thing it is, I might need to shuffle to make more space for all this, and it might even involve evicting the distribution next door.

So I'm triple-checking, is all.

Thanks,

Glenn

PS: I guess I should ask whether anyone can tell me how much space we're talking about ...

I don't think that it means the Slackware sources, but the package sources (of the packages you have built/are building). I have a complete 12.1 mirror on a spare partition (the sources sometimes come in handy), but I've never had to use them for building a package. My system entails a directory named "packages", then under it individual directories for each package. The individual directories contain the final package and a directory named "build" that contains all the build scripts & the source tar.gz for the program.
Regards,
Bill

Thanks Bill.

Just to clarify, here is what I am seeing at

http://www.slackwiki.org/Build_Environment:

jjdm writes:

"/home/slackware/source In this directory I've placed the whole slackware-source because maybe I have to temporarily build another package to build a new one because of header files and stuff."

and robw810 writes:

"The /shared/os_files/slackware/slackware-(version)/source/ directory contains all of the source files (it's copied directly from the cdroms) from that release of Slackware."

... so that's where my impression and/or confusion comes from ...

gb

Unless you're doing something pretty complex, you shouldn't need the sources (and if you do need the source for an app, you could probably just download the source for that specific app). This is only really required if the app is a dependency and the app you're compiling needs the header files from the dependency, which may not be present on your system. For most tasks, however, you will not need the sources. I have written and used many SlackBuilds and I've never had to use sources for another package. Even if an app has many dependencies, usually it doesn't require the compiled sources of the other app -- it'll usually just search for files on your system during the ./configure command and it'll be happy with that.

Bottom line: at this point, don't even worry about it. If you ever come across an app that errors out (or doesn't work) upon compilation, and you have reason to suspect that it may be failing because it needs the headers from a dependency, then by all means download the dependency's sources and compile them (and inform the new app about the location of the dependency's sources). However, you will probably never need this -- or, if you do, it'll be exceedingly rare.

Many thanks to you both for the replies. :)

I will try a SlackBuild or two and see how it goes.

gb