Hello All!

I have been using the Sbopkg tool for a while, with great success, and began to wonder why this simple and easy to use tool is not more popular and given more attention among the Slackware community.

It is a straightforward add-on that merely automates the downloading and installing slackbuilds and its sources.

However, I only found out about it in a round-about way, and it saves me hours of needless work downloading and organizing my slackbuilds.

No, I do not represent Sbopkg...I'm just very curious why an application such as this is not mainstream.

Thanks!
Murdock

Because it is still in a testing phase, as stated in its homepage

Hello Didier,

Gotcha...but that's kind of my point exactly. Why haven't people pushed more to get it mainstream and out of testing phase?

It is basically a slackpkg tool for slackbuilds.

Murdock

It reminds me a bit of a ports system.

It does seems a great tool, but it doesn't, as far as I can tell, determine that you have to meet any dependencies before trying to build and install any given package. For that reason, I'm not sure I won't still be surfing through slackbuilds repos via browser then downloading everything I need so that I can build and install everything in the proper order--when such a thing matters, of course.

Of the Slackbuilds.org scripts I tried, many were bad. Almost every time I
contacted them I got a really defensive, bad attitude reply. So since I
wouldn't use slackbuilds.org scripts, I wouldn't use sbopkg.

Third-party package managers never have gone over well in Slack.

@ Bruce Hill
To bad you have an so bad experience with slackbuilds.org
I found there builds to be the best there is for slackware and i maintain some myself so i may not be the right one to share my opinion.
And the really defensive, bad attitude reply from SBo, doesn't sound right if you ask me.
I use sbopkg allot and it's a great tool.

@robert3242
You don't need to browse the website since you can read the README files for the SlackBuilds.
And there is an build queue that you can sort for build order.

So i like to thank Chess for sbopkg and the SBo team and maintainers for there job.

But if there are negative feelings about SBo then it's good that it comes out so SBo can improve and get even better since nothing is perfect.

sbopkg is actually already a pretty popular tool, but it is a relatively new tool. There has been at least one online article featuring it. It probably will never be "mainstream" in the sense that it gets included with Slackware, however. This is because its use is for facilitating the creating of third party packages.

Which SlackBuilds were bad, and who is them (the SlackBuild maintainers or the SBo team)?

Since the SlackBuilds are submitted from a variety of people in the community, it is true that they can vary in quality coming in. However, the SBo team reviews and tests all the submitted scripts before accepting them. It is expected that submitted scripts follow certain guidelines and a template.

In addition it should be noted that the members of the SBo team include some major Slackware contributors such as Robby Workman and Eric Hameleers. These guys know what they are doing. If I am not mistaken Eric rewrote the official Slackware SlackBuilds to allow them to work for multiple architectures. I find it very hard to believe that many of the SlackBuilds are bad. Many many of the SlackBuilds eventually lead to new software included in Slackware.

Perhaps you did not use them correctly. I don't remember seeing any bug reports by you on the SBo mailing list, but please refresh my memory if I am mistaken. I am not trying to attack you, but your statement about the quality of SBo needs clarification.

I have 100+ packages installed that were created using SBo scripts and I have had no problems with any of them. Usually the issues people have with the resultant software packages are actually upstream issues that can only be fixed upstream (and not with simple patches at SBo).

Hi Bruce,

I maintain a handful of those scripts, hope mine was not one of the bad ones :-).

Andrew

I've used several Slackbuilds, and none of them were bad. I even threw VLC from 12.2 on -current a few months ago and on 13 today, and it was fine. (Yes, I'm impatient and a bit lazy.) I guess I'm a candidate for trying out sbopkg, but to be honest I'm doing okay without it, and that's maybe why it isn't so popular.

I use both slackbuilds and sbopkg regularly and rarely, if ever, had any problems. To me they are essential for system administration. To make things perfect you would need an official third party site with all possible slackbuilds on it.

samac

Never had any problems with SlackBuilds, never had any problem with sbopkg.
The only problems I've had with Slackware in general have been self-induced: NRTFM or NRTFI.

sbopkg saved me lotta time and queues are the materialization of slack!
with time (as slackbuilds.org gets more populated) it increases usefulness.
a sure thumb up!

I hate to point out the fairly obvious here, but: Sbopkg is not really a package manager. Sbopkg only compiles and builds the package, the actual installation is handled just normally by a call to slackware pkgtools and friends.

Perhaps a fine distinction to be made, but one correct anyway. SBopkg does automate/presents things a little bit more userfriendly than "source *.info && wget -c $DOWNLOAD && sh *.SlackBuild && installpkg ....... " (although I think sbopkg calls upgradepkg rather then installpkg.

Just out of curiosity, which builds did actually fail to build?

-M.

I haven't had any problems with slackbuilds.org; I'm impressed with the quality of the site. For me the build scripts have always functioned properly.