What is the difference? Please enlighten me. =)

Makepkg and installpkg are little more than glorified bash scripts for tar! Really! (See, this is what I wish every Slacker already knows...) You can load it up in vim if you want to start realizing on what truly simple principles Slackware is founded on. You can run them as a regular user just fine. You just can't touch the system directories, of course, but the same functionality is there.

Oh, and by the way, running makepkg and installpkg as normal user (or managing "user packages", as I like to call it) is what I wrote another glorified bash script called 'uupt' for.

Well, I hate feeling like an idiot like this whenever I speak out about something I don't really know, but I just tried it a few minutes ago and YOU CAN RUN CHECKINSTALL AS A NORMAL USER just fine-- it'll build a normal package without needing write permissions to system directories (because checkinstall "traps" the file operations and it doesn't really get carried out). It won't install it on the system, because you don't have the permissions as non-root.

The ownership will be wrong, (since they will be owned by the normal user who ran 'checkinstall'), but I think 'fakeroot' was written to handle exactly this kind of thing (run 'checkinstall' as 'fakeroot' so that the package will have root:root ownership, for example, but not really have "root access").

Excellent! That is truly neat! That calms my paranoia down a bit!

I still won't run it as root though.
Because I don't need to.

But it'll make it so much easier to manage user packages with uupt.

Hussar, src2pkg is just a collection of scripts so the program *is* the code. There is an uncompressed folder with all source files in the same directory where the package is:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...migo-PkgBuild/

Now, let me clear up a thing or two about checkinstall. checkinstall will only work completely if you are root -if the installation installs to any system directories.

checkinstall works by using LD_PRELOAD to intercept system calls so it knows where a file is going to be created before it happens. If you use the backup function it will make copies of the original files *before* overwriting them with the new ones. It keeps a list of all files created and then copies them into a skeleton directory and then uses makepkg to create the final package. It then runs installpkg to *register* in the pkgtool database -the files created by 'make install' have already been installed, but the database files have not. checkinstall 'drops the ball' during these operations in a minor way. Try checkinstall with any program that installs an uncompressed man-page and you can see what I mean. After all is finished you'll have a gzipped man-page which is part of the package and the original uncompressed one remains orphaned on youir system as it's not listed in the package.

src2pkg uses the same installwaatch libs as checkinstall, but does a better job of keeping track of file and directrory creation. installllwatch will even keep track of file ownership and permissions changes. The only command it will not track are 'mknod' and any suid program.
If you run checkinstall as non-root, then you are denied permssion to install system files. So checkinstall doesn't register their creation, they are not installed and will be missing from your final package.

arcanex, I apologize. That was a pretty stupid and pompous thing to write. What I was thinking about at the time had to do with apps that are suid and apps that one calls explicitly as root to perform a discreet task. Thinking back on it, I took an idea that wasn't really well-formed or pertinent, and expressed myself very rudely. Again, I'm sorry.


Thanks for the tip on fakeroot. I had never heard of it before.

It occurred to me later on as I was reading the makepkg manpage that I could have just downloaded the package to a temporary directory and then run explodepkg on it. Checkinstall has worked pretty well for me, but I wasn't aware of the man page issue you mention.

If you like checkinstall, you'll find src2pkg even easeier to use as it takes you all the way throught the build -from driectory creation to cleanup and scripting and it automatically inserts slack-desc files unless you supply one.

LoL gnashley, normal... You're a developper of src2pkg... which is nice! :-]

But... Hihi...

Where can I dl your soft...
You don't even have a webpage... at least a webpage indexed in Google.


L0L

Thank you guys,

Blue

P.S. Now I compile Qt myself with thread support to compile kdelibs to compile k3b...

Used checkinstall, 1st b/c I got that answer 1st.

It works fine for some things, but when compiling Qt >>> Awww. Error 1.

So I'll try src2pkg.

If it doesn't work. Fine...

Ill use the tip with --prefix={to a $HOME/qt-3.3.8 dir} and make myself a Slack PKG. But it's a waste of time...

Cordially,

Blue

I'm not even going to attempt to quote people, as there's simply too much. However...

1. makepkg(8) will run just fine as a normal user. /sbin isn't in a normal user's PATH, but it's still executable by a normal user.

2. checkinstall is indeed a great app, but you don't get the same granular control over the entire package contents that you have with some other methods (for example, SlackBuild scripts).

3. Building a package manually or with checkinstall has the potential to let you forget important configure options that were used to build the package. This certainly isn't an issue with a large percentage of apps, but it's important for more than handful of them - with those, you won't know exactly what options you passed last time when you need to upgrade it.

I'll admit to being a bit biased on the use of SlackBuild scripts, but I guess that's expected

#3 is very important, IMO. I know a good number of packages that fit in this category.

BlueSpirit, see the answer to Hussar for the directory where src2pkg lives. google probably doesn't have that indexed yet since the name of the software changed recently -search for PkgBuild and you'll find more, but mostly just links to this forum anyway.
src2pkg doesn't have its' own page and probably won't any time soon - I maintain over 500 packages and do some development on 20-30 different programs so I don't have much time for keeping up a webpage other than this one:
http://amigolinux.org

rworkman, one of the benefits of using src2pkg instead of checkinstall is that it will keep track of your configure and build options and customizations and write them into a script for you.

Ah, okay - I wasn't aware of that. Very nice.

Gnashley... Problem with src2pkg ... I'm maybe not patient but... Okay :

On my comp, it took me 2 hours when I compiled Qt with make.

Now, with src2pkg, I'm waiting since 3 hours and nothing? what can be wrong?

I did : src2pkg -i='make install' -e='-thread' qt-x11-free-3.3.8.tar.gz

I'm still waiting...

I'm not rly friendly with these concepts...
Just, anyone, tell me what to type in console to get a Slackware TGZ package with src2pkg. THX

4 hours : CTRL + C ... But no.

I know that theres something struck, and it won't work. But I'll not CTRL + C, because I'll just run src2pkg all night. Going bed. Later.

Thank you,

Blue

1. Post what src2pkg has printed out.
2. Check in the source directory for qt in /tmp to see if things look OK (object files are being created, etc.)
3. Check "top" to see if the compiler is running, etc.

The -i option should not be needed, since it does "make install" by default (usually, it sometimes does "scons install" or "jam install").

I'm not sure about the configure options you are using - '-thread' looks a little suspicious so make sure that is correct(usually long options have a doubel-dash -- to start, but not always).
If that is correct, then try it again. As tuxdev mentioned you shouldn't need to pass the -i option -what you are passing is the default anyway.
For packages that take a long time to compile it's good to see the ouput as you go. In order to see that src2pkg is working, use the -VV option so all messages will show from configure, make and make install.
If the sources contain a Jamfile or Sconstruct file src2pkg will try to use those by default. If you don't have jam or scons installed it could cause a hang-up, I guess. If so, let me know.

I've just tried this. The reason for the hangup is
Interactivity and src2pkg don't exactly get along very well. Perhaps src2pkg could do something with "expect"?

Omg guys. (thx for trying you too btw)
I totally forgot the question...

Okay. Is there any way to, first, show all output? -VV ? (Ill try).
Edit : I should have read Gnashley msg first... Its ok for that.

Then second, to say "yes" to the prompt?

I rapidly read mans first... HeHe.

For the -thread , don't wry, its the GOOD option. Enabling threading support is veery common in Qt.

Thank you,

Blue@

Saying "yes" to the prompt should work. It should work even if you can't actually see the question.

Anyway, why are you compiling qt yourself instead of using the official Slackware package? The -thread option?