slacker

Slackware Package Tools Automation

Overview Configuration Examples Download About

Overview

slacker is a command-line tool that automates various system maintenance tasks on Slackware Linux. It classifies packages available from remote repositories (such as slackware/, extra/ and testing/ of Slackware Linux) and performs actions depending on this classification.

For a complete list of command line options, run slacker --help.

Other scripts included in the package are:

whichpkg	Find packages by contents
slaksync	Maintain local mirror of Slackware packages
kernel-get	Uses rsync to download kernel sources from kernel.org
pkgsource	Generates MANIFEST.bz2 and CHECKSUMS.md5 files
pkgreport	slacker backend producing the package classification
pkgcache	slacker backend managing package files

Configuration

Config files are stored in /etc/slacker/. There is basically a single sources file containing a list of package repositories. It's a very simple two-column format with a name in the first column and a URL in the second. Example:

s   rsync://rsync.slackware.at/slackware/slackware-current/slackware
e   rsync://rsync.slackware.at/slackware/slackware-current/extra
t   rsync://rsync.slackware.at/slackware/slackware-current/testing

The three original Slackware repositories are named s,e,t after their respective directories slackware/, extra/ and testing/. In this example, packages will be downloaded from the Austrian Slackware Mirror using rsync. ftp and http URLs are also possible. If you maintain a local copy of Slackware (e.g. using slaksync, included in this package), you can also specify local directory paths. Note that the specified directory must contain the index files MANIFEST.bz2 and CHECKSUMS.md5.

The other configuration file is packages which comes empty after installation and will be initialized and maintained by slacker automatically. It contains again two columns per line with a package name in the first column and a preferred package source (left column in sources file) in the second column. Data in this file makes the difference between U and A classification (see above).