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/var/log/packages is empty!

I have a system with many applications installed and running perfectly, however my /var/log/packages directory is empty with the exception of x11 - related packages, I did upgrade x11 but wtf happened to the other packages?!

This happened to someone else here a little while back. Offhand, I'd say your boned. :p Really, there isn't much you can do. If I were you, I'd write a script similar to the unix log rotate deal. Have cron tarball up your /var/log/packages directory a couple minutes after you boot. Have it rotate the file names for 10 days and then delete the oldest one on the tenth day...

I don't know what else to tell you except to re-install. Maybe someone else will have an idea.

Thats kind of wierd that all of your logs are missing from /var/log/packages. Does anyone else log into this machine?

Shit, I can't see anything in /var/log/packages/, either! Could someone please post some of files (two or three) in it, so I could try to make a script to generate them.

I guess you could modify /sbin/installpkg to not install a package but write only its /var/log/packages entry. To do this you got to have all packages you installed. It would be possbile too, I think, to check if the files in the package-tgz-file can be found on your system (i. e. if you installed it or if it is a not installed package). Sorry I can't help more with this, but in /sbin/installpkg you will find the way the package files are generated.

Alright, thanks, it should not be a problem - if there is a way, I'll find it. ;)

To know which package contain which files you could parse slackware/MANIFEST.bz2, actually, you could recreate all packages "logs" by parsing slackware/MANIFEST.bz2 correctly and adding the info from the .txt files that corresponds to the package (I don't know if the package size and location shown on logs are important, I think they aren't).
I don't have time these days, but if you still can't do it at the weekend I could give you some help with it.

From MANIFEST.bz2 (I took some lines only..):

Code:

++========================================

||

||   Package:  ./a/aaa_base-10.2.0-noarch-2.tgz

||

++========================================

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2005-09-10 15:40:48 ./

drwxr-xr-x root/bin          0 1997-10-06 01:10:09 bin/

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1997-10-06 01:10:09 dev/

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2005-09-10 15:40:48 etc/

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2001-02-05 17:47:32 etc/X11/

-rw-r--r-- root/root        17 2005-09-10 15:40:48 etc/slackware-version

The log at /var/log/packages/aaa_base-10.2.0-noarch-2:

Code:

PACKAGE NAME:     aaa_base-10.2.0-noarch-2

COMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     8 K

UNCOMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     80 K

PACKAGE LOCATION: /var/log/mount/slackware/a/aaa_base-10.2.0-noarch-2.tgz

PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:

aaa_base: aaa_base (Basic Linux filesystem package)

aaa_base:

aaa_base: Sets up the empty directory tree for Slackware and adds an email to

aaa_base: root's mailbox welcoming them to Linux. :)  This package should be

aaa_base: installed first, and never uninstalled.

aaa_base:

aaa_base:

aaa_base:

aaa_base:

aaa_base:

aaa_base:

FILE LIST:

./

bin/

dev/

etc/

etc/X11/

etc/slackware-version