Hi,

People have reported issues with my pkgtool patches to speed up the View and Remove options, so Pat's dropping them to get a stable 10.1 release. I've implemented a fix which should hopefully address the problems and can be downloaded here:

ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack-current/source/a/pkgtools/pkgtool.new

If anyone who was having problems with the old patches wants to test this out and report their success/failure it would be most appreciated.

Cheers,

Jim

Hi, Jim,

I'm one who was having a problem with non-standard package descriptions. I didn't realize you'd be so quick to fix pkgtool, so I went to the trouble of standardizing all my package descriptions. However, to test your fixed pkgtool, I reverted to some of my old non-standard descriptions.

Here's what I did.

(1) I renamed my previous pkgtool script (located at /sbin/pkgtool), replaced it with your newest one from ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack-...s/pkgtool.new, and made the new pkgtool executable (i.e., same permissions as previous pkgtool).

(2) In /var/log/packages/ I replaced 21 package descriptions for installed packages with my old, non-standard descriptions. (I currently have 583 packages installed.) The non-standard descriptions were truly non-standard (e.g., varying numbers of descriptive lines; no initial label with colon on descriptive lines; many instances of duplicated "PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:" label -- perhaps put there when I used checkinstall's descriptive function).

(3) I then did "su" and ran pkgtool. It loaded very quickly. I tested:

(a) package view listing - no problems
(b) package view - no problems
(c) remove package listing - no problems
(d) remove package - no problems
(e) install package from current directory - no problems
(f) install package from other directory - no problems
(g) loading, quitting - no problems

(4) Speed appeared to be the same (i.e., enhanced) as with pkgtools-10.1.0-i486-2.tgz, both for view-listing and remove-listing.

I'll keep using the test version and let you know if I can break it.

Thanks again.

I've only touched the view listing and remove listing parts, so the rest should work as before. But thanks for checking everything

It should actually be even faster. I saw a ~3x increase on a machine here compared to the last version. On my other machines it goes too fast to measure accurately

Cheers,

Jim

I see from the changelog that Pat has indeed reverted to the much slower earlier version of pkgtool. I'm still using the fixed latest version and haven't had the slightest problem. It's such a nice improvement.

I do wish that checkinstall would somehow produce standard Slackware package descriptions when the user tells it to make a Slackware package. But I imagine a lot of users -- especially home users, hobbyists and geeks -- will be getting packages from a lot of different sources, so it's good if pkgtool can tolerate non-standard descriptions.

I'm curious: have you got it now so that the description isn't a factor at all, or are there still parameters within which the description has to fit?

Thanks for your work on this, Jim.

Hi!

I think there's too much talk about a so-called "slack-desc standard", which isn't actually that important. In the same way the speculations about checkinstall's descriptions: It isn't checkinstall's fault at all! The slack-descs it produces are quite correct, there's not much to do wrong.

The problem that was reported, is pkgtool-10.1.0-i486-1 generated a wrong dialog if Slackware's package "checkinstall-1.5.3-i486-2" was installed (you can test it in your shell):

And that was just because there was a quotation mark in that description of the package checkinstall-1.5.3-i486-2.tgz that is included in Slackware.

The problem I had was different from this one, though there was probably also a checkinstall connection.

I would compile a package myself and, when checkinstall would prompt for a description, I would type in some stuff that was meaningful to me but which didn't follow the convention. Normally that didn't pose a problem, except that the package tools wouldn't necessarily display the info the way I would have liked (and they would have it had followed the conventions).

But one version of pkgtool (pkgtool-10.1.0-i486-2, not *-1) did break entirely when it encountered my non-standard descriptions; that's now been fixed. When it was suggested that I examine my package descriptions in /var/log/packages, I saw that not only were they horribly inconsistent, but there were outright errors that were not of my doing, e.g., the "PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:" section label was repeated in many of the descriptions. I don't know how this happened unless it was done by checkinstall.

Still, all is fine now, since a fix was posted. It has all the speed advangtages of pkgtool-10.1.0-i486-1 and *-2, without the glitches that you refer to or that I encountered. I threw all my non-standard package descriptions at it and it didn't choke at all. Which is good, since I'm dependent on checkinstall and didn't want to have to hand-edit any more descriptions.

And which version of checkinstall did you use? That one from Slackware's extra directory or that one from checkinstall's page? Because Slackware's package is based on makepkg and the other one on a custom "makepak" script.

Good question. I was using a checkinstall that I got from the checkinstall page, not from Slackware. Just now I replaced the one I was using with the official Slackware version, and I see that there are differences.

Though both are version 1.53, the Slackware one is tailored for Slackware's packaging system. For one thing, the generic version gives you a choice of three distros' packaging schemes; the Slackware version doesn't. I would always choose Slackware, but the generic version doesn't produce a package with a "standard" Slackware package description. The official Slackware checkinstall, however, does a better job of conforming to the convention, although it still doesn't produce the standard 11 lines. It does, however, produce a label for each line of the description and, perhaps more importantly, it didn't produce a duplicate "PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:" section label.

I really don't know how significant all this is, except that, for one of its releases, pkgtool chocked on non-standard package descriptions which had been produced by a generic version of checkinstall. Interstingly, I don't think the generic version of checkinstall triggered the error you referred to; only the Slackware version of checkinstall did.

I think it would be good if the name of the checkinstall package more clearly reflected whether it is customized for Slackware or not. But these things are not hugely significant in the great scheme of things.

What *does* concern me is that a greatly improved version of pkgtool has been dropped form 10.1 beta because of these small glitches. But I'm sure that will work out sooner or later. If Pat doesn't put the enhanced pkgtool back in current after 10.1, I hope he'll put it in /testing and that people will use it. It makes a big difference in performance.

'Nuff said.

It just reads the line after the first "PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:" and removes anything that looks like a preceeding package name. Anything with no "PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:" at all won't show up.

Jim

I've misplaced Jim's modified pkgtool script (referred to above) and need to find a copy somewhere. I inadvertently updated pkgtool from Slackware Current and am realizing how much faster Jim's version is than the stock release. Trouble is, I can't find Jim's pkgtool anywhere. The link above seems to be dead.

Does anyone know where I can find this? Thanks.

All's O.K. now. I had to log on using a different address for some reason.

BTW, if you haven't tried Jim's modified pkgtool, you're really missing something. It's much, much faster than the stock version. It was included in Current for some time, but was removed because of a glitch that has since been corrected. But PV must be waiting for a while to return it to Current.

I've been using it for nearly six months now and haven't had any problems whatsoever. Then today I inadvertently upgraded to the latest pkgtool, which zapped my modified version. I immediately saw the difference. Stock pkgtool is sloooooooooooow.