Had fun repackaging OpenDX for Slackware today
I spent about 3 hours re-packaging OpenDX to run on Slackware for a customer today. It was nice to just get back to some good old fashioned UNIX admin work for a change.
Some people may hate the Slackware package management system or accuse it of just being a tar file (or being nonexistent) but they would only be partly right.
In Slackware package files are just tar files but the real brains behind the packaging is inside the package utilities themselves. The packaging utilities are wrappers around tar and maintain a catalog of files installed with a package so that it can be removed or upgraded later. They also can execute shell scripts included in the tarball inside of the install directory. There is no dependency tracking but the same can mostly be said of System V Release 4 packages (as used on Solaris)
Either way love it or hate it the Slackware package system is very easy to work with as a result of it's simplicity. build your project into a directory tree that reflects how the files should look relative to the root file system. put any extra needed stuff inside the install directory and build it with makepkg and you are done.
You can even use rpm2tgz to transfer an rpm into a regular tar file and work off of that if you have to. or just build the tar yourself without makepkg and still get the benefit of being able to uninstall it using removepkg later on.
I subscribe to the idea that small and simple is beautiful. Slackware packages may be lacking in modern features but they are simple and easy to work with which I find quite refreshing in this age of horribly complex software.
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