I'm starting out with a new Slack install on my laptop, and I learned about the checkinstall program. I installed that first, and then used it to make a couple of programs (aterm and gkrellm). Everything seemed to work in the process, except when I went into pkgtool, the description that I entered in the checkinstall process wasn't on the screen. On the second install, I used that --newslack option that is supposed to fix descriptions for new versions of Slack, but that didn't do anything either. On the remove menu in the pkgtool utility, the name of the package appears on the left, but nothing is next to it on the right. Any ideas as to why this is happening? It's not a huge deal, but it would be nice to fix for the future.

Also, with the gkrellm install, I got a message telling me the install process put some files in the build directory, and it suggested that I not include these in the package. I went along with that default, but I was wondering what those files might be and why I don't want to include them in the package.

Thanks,
Johnathan

If you include these non-needed files in your packages you will get some link files in your / directory that point nowhere (things that you don't want) so you did good with default don't include them.

For description, checkinstall use its description syntax which is little different than official slackware one, checkinstall description appears when you use installpkg tool. You can do a checkinstall package with an offical slackware description syntax but it will be a little tedious as you may need to changes things in the install script for the package.

Ok. I'll leave it alone if it's doing what it's supposed to do, but I just wanted to make sure those descriptions were going somewhere. I'm still curious about why a program would install files to its build directory and how those would create links pointing to nowhere, but I suppose that's not important if I know I'm always supposed to go along with the default.

I asked myself the same question and already did a post here about that but no answers

OK

I am currently experimenting with checkinstall as well.

As far as the descriptions go, did you make a file called description-pak?
It's described in the checkinstall docs.

In it you put the description according to the following syntax:

......|-----handy-ruler------------------------------------------------------|
bind: bind version (DNS server and utilities)
bind:
bind: The named daemon and support utilities such as dig, host
bind: and nslookup. Sample configuration files for running a
bind: simple caching nameserver are included. Documentation
bind: for advanced setup can be found in /usr/doc/bind-9.x.x/.
bind:
bind:
bind: Package created by YOUR NAME HERE
bind:
bind:

of course you replace 'bind' with the package name, and modify the text
accordingly, (and delete the handy ruler after you finish editing so
that you know the text strings are not too long).
Hint: on the first line - in this example , 'bind version',
replace all of 'bind version' with 0.4.2 or whatever, else the text is hard to read in pkgtool.
keep the short description in brackets, this is probably the most useful bit.

there is some good info (where I got this) here:
http://www.linuxpackages.net/howto.p...erfect+Package

I have a question now for you:
Is it possible to create the package with checkinstall without actually installing it?
I saw somewhere a post that gave an option for the checkinstallrc file
that did this, but I never got it to work.

tobyl

edit: changed file name to 'description-pak'

I modified my version of checkinstall to not install package automatically...

[edit]
...But I discover that my modifications let make install, install file anyway I will look deeper at checkinstall to do a lighter version (with no rpm etc)