As of today my employer closed down their free social network and blogging site, a.k.a. "My Opera" and hence my old blog is gone.

I mention this because from time to time a few people here (e.g. Didier Spaier, GazL, TobiSGD, etc.) referenced a post I once made about Slackware and dependencies.

Anyway, for those interested, just before "My Opera" shutdown I submitted all my old blog posts to The Internet Archive for prosperity (and yes I made a donation!). Which means if you want to reference the post in the future you can use the following URL:

web.archive.org/web/20140303100105/http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/2011/09/26/slackware-package-and-dependency-management

Sorry if this post feels like shameless self promotion but others have referenced the post in the past and I assume they might want to again.

Thanks, Ruari. It's a good article.

If you don't mind Ruario, I have made a copy here because it complements the Slackware documentation nicely: http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:..._off_slackware

What do you want me to do with the comments on that blog? Just mention them on the Wiki page or copy/paste them to the "talk" section?

Eric

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@AlienBob: I certainly do not mind at all. In fact thanks!

With regards to any of my comments I am more than happy for you to use them any way you see fit, so please feel free to do whatever you feel makes most sense.

+1 for having that very worthy article at the Slackware Documentation Project.

I wish R's article could be put up at the top - permanently.
I had read it before, but revisited it - 'ts a great article! Kudos!

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Or just use the --format=gnu tar option? Why doesn't Pat use that instead of a separate package?

If I remember correctly: Once Upon A Time, that didn't work.

It still doesn't, --format=gnu is irrelevant. Creation with tar 1.13 is all about how sub directory names are stored when adding a directory as '.'

Consider the following examples:

GNU Tar 1.13 (or with my transform) store the subdirectory as testdir/, while GNU Tar 1.14 and above store it as ./testdir/. Pkgtools expects the former, not the later.

If you want to find out more about why GNU Tar 1.13 is used (this is not the only reason), read this thread.

By the way, this is why I said in my post that people should really use just use pkgtools (makepkg) for creation. Slackware packages are just tar files so it is possible to do stuff without makepkg but not everyone understands these little intricacies.

I must admit that sometimes in my own scripts I don't use makepkg but I got into this habit because I used to have a script that automatically made Slackware packages of Opera internal builds on a non-Slackware (Debian) machine. This would allow me to instantly fetch the latest internal build from my work desktop or home machine without having to do a local repack. Of course the first time I tried to do this I made a broken package (and the second time) but after that I did some investigation and realised what I had to do. Now I have a few public scripts (e.g. latest-chrome) that also do this as it allows me to make use of tar's --user and --owner options to make packages that have root owned files, even when run as a normal user.

I was thinking about translating this article and posting it under www.vivaolinux.com.br, a brazilian linux community. Since I didn't find any info on your blog I have to ask: would you mind if I do it?

Why don't you just translate the Slackware Wiki page and tell your friends about it?

http://docs.slackware.com/start?id=p..._off_slackware would be that page.

Eric

No I don't mind, in fact If you want me to state license I guess I would go with CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. It seems like a reasonable license to me and the Slackware Wiki uses it as its default.

P.S. I would also prefer you went with AlienBob's suggestion and did your translation on the Slackware wiki itself.

If I ever do the translation (it is a huge post and my english isn't that good) I will post on both