Slackbuilds
As I've said, I've been messing with Slackbuild scripts since checkinstall is
unhappy with the latest Slackware. I have to say one thing so far about them
and that is, "Why didn't I mess with these things earlier?" There are a few
apps I feel I need and don't really want to wait and rely on someone else to
make a package on Linuxpackages.net. One of them is
digiKam. Of course, it and
it's dependencies aren't available yet on Linuxpackages.net and the slackbuild
at slackbuilds.org is only validated for Slackware 11.0 in addition to be a
slightly older version. Lucky for me all but 2 of the dependencies already
existed on Slackbuilds.org so I only needed to make scripts for the 2 missing
dependencies and digiKam itself. That wasn't all to hard as I just grabbed an
existing script and modified it accordingly. The resulting packages seem to
work OK so I submitted them to Slackbuilds.org if they want them. Maybe it'll
save someone else a bit of time.
Making a Slackbuild from scratch would take much more work but then you'd only
have to do the work once as the script will create a .tgz for you. And once
the initial one is made it seems fairly easy to updated it to newer versions of
the thing it's meant to build. I see the benefits of of Slackbuilds over
existing packages. Those being:
- The resulting package is compiled specifically for you system.
- You can read the script and see what options are compiled in which could be
useful if the program isn't working as expected.
- It makes a tgz which can be installed via the installpkg command which is
nice for if you want to ever remove it from your system. Not every makefile
seems to have the uninstall option making it sometimes difficult to get a
manually compiled program removed.
- You don't have to rely on someone else to make the package and, since you
compiled at and can review the script, you will know exactly how the package
was made and can easily make changes.
- The resulting package will be true to "The Slackware Way" if the script is
written correctly.
If that isn't nice enough I ran into a really nice script on
Chess Griffin's
Blog. Yup, that's the Chess of the
Linux Reality Podcast. Anyway, the script is called
buildsbo. What it does is rsyncs the Slackbuilds.org repo
to your system and will automatically get the source for you, validate it's
checksum, and run the slackbuild for you in one command. For example, to
install digiKam it would simply be:
# ./buildsbo digikam
And when it's all done you'll have the .tgz in /tmp. Pretty cool eh?