It's been a few years since I've had a Slackware box in the house. I was previously using swaret. As far as I understand there was a difference between Pat V. and swaret's developer so swaret is no longer current. I'm looking for a swaret replacement like apt-get or portage for Slackware, because of ease of use for security and software updates.

I do have Kpackage, but I do not know if it can be configured to do what I am looking for.

Any suggestions?

brr, it's en vogue!


slackpkg is in extra/ , so it's kinda official. there are others...

and kpackage is useless!

And that's why I'm no longer taking French!

Just curious about why you would consider it useless. Seems to work great and saved me when stupid aRTs wanted to bomb me with a large number of error windows.

Thanks for the poke about slackpkg! I'll check it out, but I'm still open to more ideas.

I just download everything I need into one directory and 'installpkg *' (or *.tgz).

Guess that doesn't help much.

Ultimately, there's really no substitute for reading the ChangeLog, even if you do use an automated tool.
I strongly prefer keeping a local mirror of the relevant package tree - use rsync(1) to do that - and just use the pkgtool(8) suite for upgrades and such. I will admit to double-checking myself with slackpkg(8) - it's easy to overlook things in a big ChangeLog update, but that's not really as applicable if you're just keeping track of /patches to a stable release.

I have switched from using swaret to using slackpkg for automated updates. I particularly like the feature in slackpkg that allows for prompting of what to do with the .new files.
I run slackpkg with entries in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist so that _no_ kernel packages are updated.

I like using kpackage to review the packages installed on my system, but not for any administrative tasks.

I never do automated updates without first consulting the changelog. It is necessary to check for new packages as well as old packages that can be deleted.

here is a good list

smart package manager
slackpkg ( of course the standard )
slapt-get ( apt-get for slackware )
emerde ( portage for slackware )

Okay so I tried slackpkg and it was great until it told me I had a broked (that's exactly what it said) kernel. So I let it remove what it said was broken and it got rid of my modules for 2.6 kernel. I'll just have to get them again.

So for anyone else new to slackpkg, might I suggest using the blacklist instead of the remove option.

Thanks for all the info, I'll check out slapt-get and emerde sometime this week!

Now that we're talking about package managers, has anyone tested pkgsrc from NetBSD on Slackware?

i've tested it with netbsd and have gone halfway through this tutorial .
the problem is imho that you have to install a really minimal system. guess it's easier to use a source based distro from the start then.

pkgsrc and Linux works very well. There are some issues with a couple of packages, but nothing a patch can't fix

I'm currently maintaining a Slackware "fork" named Draco, it's a minimal Slackware using pkgsrc as the default package manager. Most of the packages will compile and work, some need patches to work optimal (ALSA etc) and others are not tested good enough against Linux. So, if you plan to use pkgsrc in Slackware I would recommend that you look at some of the patches I use against pkgsrc-2007Q1.

Patches: ftp.dracolinux.org/draco/pkgsrc/2007Q1/patches
Packages: ftp.dracolinux.org/draco/pkgsrc/2007Q1/packages/All

Hi olear,

I installed dracolinux but there is not to much information in Dracolinux home page. Do you know where to find more information.

Thanks

What kind of information you seek? If you want more information about the pkgsrc look it up from here.

I plan to test the Draco Linux as soon as I get my network connection up and running.

My src2pkg probably provides a better alternative for building and installing packages from source. There is no dependency resolution, but if your builds are right and in the right order it can build and install groups or chains of dependent packages.

The OP was asking about package management anyway and may not be interested in building from source. I don't use any sort of package updating system at all, with or without dependency resolution. I do use several small programs which provide dependency information on installed packages(like slapdeptrack) and src2pkg can give you the info about what is needed for a package that it is building(or converting from rpm or deb).

Since I haven't tried any of them I can't help much, except to mention that I noticed on freshmeat the other day a new for-Slackware system updater that I haven't seen mentioned here -something called slackroll.

I use the ROX-filer for my desktop so I wrote a small AppDir which wraps several handy package info commands into a handy little app which will:
1. left-clicking runs an xterm with pkgtool running in it.
right-clicking brings up a menu with these options:
2. Show a very quick listing of installed packages
3. List the files belonging to a package which you select from a package list
3. Tell you which installed package a file belongs
4. Search for a 'missing' file in a MANIFEST file which you select.

Dropping a valid Slackware package on the icon will install it using installpkg or upgradepkg as needed, if it's not already installed.
Mostly simple bash, mind you, and using Xdialog/greq for GUI -my favorite feature of ROX.

Anyway, just wanted to mention this slackroll program I spotted...

I use slackpkg for installation and updates. For 3rd party packages from repositories like linuxpackages.net and slacky.eu I also use slapt-get and swaret for dependency checks. I don't use them for installing packages, but some of their additional features are quite useful.

I've seen some people rave about smart package manager. Has anyone tried it on Slackware, and tell us their experiences? Same question for emerde, of course.

I'll have to try out src2pkg, sounds very interesting, gnashley!

gargamel