How to Maintain Slackware with Applications that are Built Locally?
 

Hi,

When installing applications on Slackware that must be built locally because no *.tgz packages are available, is it better or even possible to somehow use makepkg to first build the application, then wrap it into a package, and then install the package with installpkg?

It would probably be very hard to do this especially when cmake is involved, but is this the recommended procedure? I use something called Wt-Toolkit which uses cmake to install, which usually doesn't work completely, then I do all kinds of special hacks to get a successful build, and by that time I have no idea about how to uninstall what I have done and upgrades become very hard.

Is there a better way?

Make a slackbuild script for that package, so it's easier for you to maintain

That depends. If you have source (say, a configure-make-make install), you could use src2pkg to create an installable/upgradeable Slackware package; you can download src2pkg from http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/src2pkg/.

You can (probably) find ready-to-build packages at SlackBuilds.org: slackbuilds.org.

You can create your own SlackBuilds; see how at SlackBuilds.org.

Hope this helps some.

In addition to what is already posted here, in difficult cases slacktrack may be the tool of choice to build packages for Slackware.

Even though it is for Slackware 12, you could probably still use the wt.SlackBuild which is included on this page: http://redmine.webtoolkit.eu/project...t_on_Slackware

Eric

Thanks for all responses.

I am glad to know about slackbuilds.org and I may try the wt.slackbuild.

Thanks.