It has been a while since I ran Slackware. When I did, makepkg, installpkg, etc., all required a certain version of tar. I was wondering if that is still the case?

Secondly, I remember that the package management tools would save symlinks in an unexpected way: they'd would be re-created via a script during the install of a package. Some testing on my part has revealed that tar actually handles symlinks correctly. In view of that datum, is there still need of a doinst script merely to handle symlinks?

Apologies if this was changed before current version of Slackware. As I said in the beginning, it has been a while since I last ran it.

Thank you.

p.s. I would hate to download a whole iso just to look at three or four scripts; would be a waste of bandwidth. That is why I have asked this here.

You don't need to download an iso. http://slackware.uk/slackware/slackw...tools/scripts/

There are plenty of threads in this forum if you search for 'tar-1.13'. Use of tar-1.13 by pkgtools is no longer necessary since --keep-directory-symlink was re-added to Gnu tar, but it is sufficient, and why change something critically important for forward and backward compatibility that is, within the limits of pkgtools, not broken?

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Yes, there is. Let's say that you have a package containing a directory called /foo. Now let's assume that an updated version of the package changes /foo from a directory to a symlink. Also consider if this happens the other way around.

Run a few tests on this scenario and see if the latest tar handles the situation as expected.

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