swaret is dead, long live slackpkg

gargamel · 02-28-2005, 03:22 AM

Thank you, SiegeX, for your extensive reply. You answered my questions to the point.

What I would really like to have is what sh1ft brought up:

Quote:

Originally posted by sh1ft
Is it not possible to be able to upgrade official packages only with official packages and only use repos. packages to upgrade repos packages already installed?

So if you are in correspondence with the slapt-get folks, you can tell them that there is now one more user interested in such a feature. Maybe three users are a better motivation than one... ;-)

Regarding your search for a package managed distro: Did you think of simply installing APT or RPM on Slack? RPM is included in the official distro!

gargamel

satinet · 02-28-2005, 04:59 AM

I started something here.......

The idea above sounds like a good one. Would make management rather simpler....

I wholeheartedly agree that most of the time, it's just using the tool blindly and hoping for the best that causes the problems.

I guess the ideal tool would enable you to 'roll back' with the stroke of a command. Somehow keeping the old data in a folder. Er taking up gigs of data. Lol. It's not easy is it?

On the subject of slack - I used ubuntu for my laptop. Yeah, it's easy to configure your hardware. But i am really on rails. and I wasn't exactly blow away by the application getting tool. Why would I only want to get packages I already have on the CD. oh yeah. i have to add another repository. I couldn't believe it when it asked me for the CD. I had a pretty nasty windoze 95 flash back there, that i am still recovering from...

Anyway, I always come back to slack.... I just feel a bit of an ignoramus if I dissmiss everything else so I don't give them a try.

All this said, I was a bit dissapointed with slack 10.1 - Pat's been ill. So that's fair enough. I hope he makes a full recovery and that slack 11 really raises the bar.

Anyone got any news on it?

SiegeX · 03-07-2005, 06:45 PM

Quote:

Here again is what I see to be the major shortcoming of both swaret and slapt-get. The way repositories are implemented is godawful.
Is it not possible to be able to upgrade official packages only with official packages and only use repos. packages to upgrade repos packages already installed?

Ask and ye shall receive! As promised I worked hand-in-hand with the author of slapt-get to be able to bring this functionality to you that
uses the existing framework with little to no modifications. Luckilly I was able to come up with a solution that only required a very minor change
to slapt-get which is introduced in the now-released 0.9.9i version.

The one-time setup procedure is as follows[list=1][*]Install the 0.9.9i version of slapt-get availible HERE [*]Remove ALL non-official SOURCE lines from your slapt-getrc[*]Create a file called unofficialrc in the same directory as your slapt-getrc file[*]Add all the unofficial SOURCE lines to this new unofficialrc file[*]Make the EXCLUDE line in your unofficialrc look like the following --> EXCLUDE=/slackware/[a-z]+[/list=1]

If you want to upgrade official packages with only official sources you need only run the following code

Code:

slapt-get --update && slapt-get --upgrade

Now for the new feature, if you want to upgrade ONLY unofficial packages with unofficial sources then run the following code

Code:

slapt-get --update --config unofficialrc && slapt-get --upgrade --config unofficialrc

To show you how this works, let me run it on my box with the old 0.9.9h slapt-get and then the new 0.9.9.i slapt-get

First, lets show my two config files, first slapt-getrc

Code:

[root@maximus]# cat /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc
# See /usr/doc/slapt-get-0.9.9h/example.slapt-getrc
# for example source entries and configuration hints.
WORKINGDIR=/var/slapt-get
EXCLUDE=kernel-.*,alsa-.*,.*-[0-9]dl$,devs,aaa_elflibs,sendmail,openssh,bash-completion,checkinstall
SOURCE=http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-current/
SOURCE=http://software.jaos.org/slackpacks/current/

Now unofficialrc

Code:

[root@maximus]# cat /etc/slapt-get/unofficialrc
# See /usr/doc/slapt-get-0.9.9h/example.slapt-getrc
# for example source entries and configuration hints.
WORKINGDIR=/var/slapt-get
EXCLUDE=/slackware/[a-z]+
SOURCE=ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/
SOURCE=ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/

Now lets see what happens when I try to upgrade ONLY unoffical packages with unofficial sources using the OLD slapt-get

Code:

[root@maximus]# slapt-get --version
slapt-get version 0.9.9h
[root@maximus]# slapt-get --update --config unofficialrc && slapt-get --upgrade --config unofficialrc
Retrieving package data [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Cached
Retrieving patch list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Done
Retrieving checksum list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Cached
Reading Package Lists...Done
Retrieving package data [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Cached
Retrieving patch list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Done
Retrieving checksum list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Cached
Reading Package Lists...Done
Reading Package Lists... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  whois getmail xscreensaver squid libidn cyrus-sasl pango clamav imapd apache
  libwmf bison reiserfsprogs python checkinstall hping2 gnet ruby t1lib mysql
  gnupg libmng xvim libgsf php
25 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 53MB of archives.
After unpacking 12MB of additional disk space will be used.

I bolded out the imporant parts here. As you can see, it wants to upgrade a ton of official packages with versions from linuxpackages.net
which is what everybody was complaining about.

Now lets see what happens with the NEW slapt-get

Code:

[root@maximus]# slapt-get --version
slapt-get version 0.9.9i
[root@maximus]# slapt-get --update --config unofficialrc && slapt-get --upgrade --config unofficialrc
Retrieving package data [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Cached
Retrieving patch list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Done
Retrieving checksum list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.1/]...Cached
Reading Package Lists...Done
Retrieving package data [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Cached
Retrieving patch list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Done
Retrieving checksum list [ftp://ftp3.linuxpackages.net/pub/Slackware-10.0/]...Cached
Reading Package Lists...Done
Reading Package Lists... Done
The following packages have been EXCLUDED:
  whois getmail xscreensaver libidn pango imapd apache libwmf reiserfsprogs
  python gnet t1lib mysql gnupg libmng libgsf php
The following packages will be upgraded:
  squid cyrus-sasl clamav bison checkinstall hping2 ruby xvim
8 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 17 not upgraded.
Need to get 10MB of archives.
After unpacking 840kB of additional disk space will be used.

Again I bolded out the important part. As you can see, all those offical packages are now EXCLUDED! The only packages it wants to upgrade
are the ones I made myself, and I can easily remove those from the upgrade list by adding them to the EXCLUDE line.

Now how does it work you ask? The question at hand was how do we know if the package is official or not without having to download
huge manifest files and parsing those. This actually took a bit of thinking but the solution turned out to be very simple. While browsing
through the /var/log/packages/ directory I noticed that every official package had the text slackware followed by the
two-letter diskset abbreviation in the Package Location line (this is what the regex /slackware/[a-z]+ does). All that
Jason (slapt-get author) had to do was tell slapt-get to add this to its list of lines to exclude on. Enjoy

encore · 03-07-2005, 07:15 PM

sooooooooooooo
who has any experience with this
is it really better???

OhMyAchingGut · 03-08-2005, 03:59 PM

I've used Slackware for quite some time now. What has always worked for me is to download whatever i want to my local /packages directory, and installpkg /packages/*.tgz. If i want to uprade official slackware packages, just wget what i want from a mirror, and upgradepkg *.tgz.

installpkg, upgradepkg, and removepkg have never done me wrong. I've never had all that much difficulty in using them, in my opinion.

Honestly, if i wanted a tool like slapt-get/swaret/etc. i would just run Debian and use apt-get. It does a wonderful job of doing this, because Debian was designed around it. Slackware was not. This is why sooner or later, most new slack users go astray with 3rd party package managers.

You can stick anyone in front of Debian and apt-get, and they will be just fine...as long as they _only_ use apt-get

They only 3rd party system that has seemed very interesting(to me) is NetBSD's pkgsrc. It works wonderfully for me in NetBSD, and it supports Slackware. Just haven't gotten around to trying it yet...partially because my needs are already met with slackware's existing tols for the most part.

gargamel · 03-08-2005, 06:00 PM

Thanks again, SiegeX!
This really sounds good, and I'll give it a try once I am home again.

One question: Updates for stable are in directory slackware/patches. This is all I want on a production server.
Is it really this, what slapt-get uses?

Even if not, slapt-get can stil be very useful now, in maintaining 3rd party packages like Firefox!

Thanks again,

gargamel

BrianW · 03-08-2005, 06:11 PM

I've used slackpkg, slapt-get, and swaret. My experiences covers them all (periods differing) and is only limited to my needs of a way to upgrade my box. While using them I've always been in the current tree. Both slapt-get and swaret have messed up my system, probably due to the fact I failed to ever really check the CHANGELOG when I did upgrades with them. I now use slackpkg and love it. It really isn't hard to use, bookmark the CHANGELOG and check it whenever or have a script to automatically check the changelog for changes. When I do upgrade via several dates, I start at the oldest upgrade and work myself to the current upgrade and have found no problems arise. Slackpkg is not that hard of a program, just update the package list, and then use upgrade each package individually. Slackpkg seems just to cut the steps out of downloading the files with wget and then using installpkg, nothing more. Use whatever you're confident with and want to use.

gargamel · 03-08-2005, 06:13 PM

I agree with you, but as has been said before, slackpkg only works with official packages. It is of no help for 3rd party stuff.

gargamel

SiegeX · 03-09-2005, 12:20 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by gargamel

One question: Updates for stable are in directory slackware/patches. This is all I want on a production server.
Is it really this, what slapt-get uses?

Slapt-get will use whatever SOURCEs you give it in your slapt-getrc file. So if you only want to do security updates to 10.1-STABLE then make sure you only give it 10.1 mirrors in the slapt-getrc and run slapt-get --update && slapt-get --upgrade. If you want to update only 3rd party packages seperatly then thats when you use my unofficialrc and tell slapt-get to use that as described above.

gargamel · 03-11-2005, 12:42 PM

Thanks, SiegeX, that was clear to me, but my question was unprecise.

What I was going to ask, is: Can I restrict slapt-get to certain directories?
There will probably never ever be any updates for a STABLE release of Slackware anywhere else than in slackware/patches. In that unlikely case, however, I would like to get only the security patches from slackware/patches, but nothing from any other directory.

But I guess, my question is simply irrelevant, and the modified slapt-get will celebrate its premier on one of my machines pretty soon... ;-)

Thanks a lot again

gargamel

nirav_patel · 03-16-2005, 10:20 PM

ok, it's a great util but how to configure proxy (with authentication) with slackpkg?
I am behind squid.

Any idea?

Nirav

syg00 · 04-05-2005, 06:10 AM

God help the new Slack user.
Me in this case.

I think I said in one of my first post in this forum (a couple of weeks back) that I'd reserve comment on package management.

Having fun with Slack, but a crate-load of package tools !!!!.
Gotta be sorted out folks.

erawkcals · 05-08-2005, 09:56 PM

Hi guys, I use slackpkg and think it is the best tool, also I'm trying the new tool slackrep (sf.net/projects/slackrep) for reporting and found it very handy.
Give it a try.

Regards,

freakyg · 05-08-2005, 11:21 PM

I've never used slackpkg or swaret for that matter......I have one simple rule........if it ain't broke, don't fix it........I've noticed in the short time I've been here that too many people spend all their time constantly upgrading........If your Linux install works like it should and does what you want.....don't break it by upgrading the kernel every other day!!

I built LFS 5.0 and BLFS over a year ago.....I still use it, yes it is using kernel 2.4.29 now and other minor upgrades, but it works just fine and has only crashed twice since I built it..............thats my $.02

Kovacs · 05-09-2005, 05:41 AM

I use swaret to keep my Slack 10.1 production servers up to date, basically because it's simple and it works, and I am too lazy / busy to learn anything else. I'm careful and I've never had a problem with it, so it's not all bad.