Hi All,

I need some information on a default Slackware Installation in order to verify some aspects for a “dump” package Slackbuild I wrote.

I understand that this package is absent from Slack. Can anyone give hints on why? I suspect that it conflicts with Slack’s tar package on these two files:

/usr/sbin/restore
/usr/man/man8/rmt.8.gz

I would appreciate if anyone can confirm or otherwise.

Chris

I can confirm that both of those files are present in the current tar-1.16.1-i486-1 package. If your other packages has these same files, then that could be a problem.

You can simply change the name of the program to something else in order to avoid conflicts or leave it out is it is not needed. Or you might do it the other way around and repackage tar leaving out those files -rmt is used for archiving to/from tape devices which you are not likely to be doing.

Thank you for your answers. Your suggestions are welcome and I can clearly indicate that the Dump package conflicts are not hindering my Slack installation. My query was intended to throw light on why Dump is not installed on Slack by default. I noticed these conflicts and would like to know from anyone with enough clout in the Slackware community that can submit any hints as to what drives the Dump package out of Slackware. Although we owe the distribution to a single person, I guess we are still free to enquire about its structure. I started from this "official" Slackware forum as a first source of help and I hope to be given more information in this respect.

As for rmt itself, the tar rmt and the dump rmt reside in different directories and so they do not conflict. I am not using rmt in any case but I can call whichever I want by qualifying its full path. However one man file is possible unless I rename. This also applies to the restore application.

Many consider Dump as an outdated package, but it is important for Linux Certification. I am not interested in cetification for myself (I am a 40 yr old engineer) but I am still learning Linux. If we want Slackware to be relevant for learning Linux than I deem the Dump package is important.

Chris

It's not related to Slackware, but this post from Linus Torvalds to the kernel mailing list provides some background information that might be helpful to you.

Am I to understand that Dump was dumped out of Slackware because of this stance by Linus?

Just to balance the argument I would like to post this link, but at the end we are all free to have an opinion on the matter.

http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

I hope that I would not be interpret as trying to push Dump in Slack but I am not yet convinced.

I would like to point out that Slack is known as a pure Linux distribution, i.e. that packages are installed as delivered by the code authors and as things stand, tar and dump cannot co-exist. Messing with tar on Slackware is like playing with fire. If it is uninstalled then the pkgtools will not work, and you cannot re-install tar.

Chris

While the debate about dump certainly didn't help, the main reason it isn't included in Slackware is simply because it is outdated and unnecessary. There are many tools and methods to backup and restore filesystems now, ones which are capable of a lot more than dump is or ever will be. I don't even think dump is actively maintained anymore, there hasn't been a new version in nearly 3 years.

No, I'm sorry that I was unclear. I didn't mean to imply that I have any "official" insight, just that there are lots of good reasons not to include dump. One of the reasons given by Linus in 2001 is even more true today; dump only supports ext2 (or ext3), while other tools support multiple filesystems.

(To be honest, I don't even remember dump ever being in Slackware.)

I read your comments.

I understand that although dump is still found on other main stream distributions it probably never featured on Slackware. We might not share the same opinion on the matter but that is not my prerogative to comment, and as someone stated, it will not help. A readily available dump SlackBuild might satisfy some users however. Do you agree?

May I please be informed about which tools do you normally use for backup applications on Slackware?

Chris

I don't have an opinion. All I did was supply a link to someone else's.

On my systems, I just make gzipped tar archives and then burn them to CD. If I keep it simple, I'm more likely to actually keep up.

Other options available by default are cpio and rsync. You could run them from cron. If I were more organized, I would install rsnapshot and do incremental backups, or clone my drive using partimage or ghost4linux.

But if you are comfortable with dump, why not use that? The beauty of Slackware is that you can make it do whatever you want.