############################################################################## # Document: OVERVIEW # Purpose : Provide an overview of the Slackware package system incorporating # the use of 'slacktrack' # Please note that this is *not* a guide to the use of slacktrack; # the man page and SlackBuild scripts in the 'examples' directory # aim to fulfill that requirement. # Date....: 18-Nov-2004 # Author..: Stuart Winter # Homepage: http://www.interlude.org.uk/unix/slackware ############################################################################## CONTENTS: --------- 1.0 Preamble 2.0 Slackware packages 2.0.1 Format of official Slackware packages 2.0.1.1 Package names 2.0.1.2 Version numbers 2.0.1.3 Architectures 2.0.1.4 Build numbers 2.1 An overview of the creation of official Slackware packages 2.1.1 'Clean' and 'dirty' builds 2.1.1.1 Clean builds 2.1.1.2 Dirty builds 2.1.1 SlackBuild and .build scripts 2.1.1.2 SlackBuild scripts 2.1.1.3 .build scripts 2.2 slacktrack in the scheme of things 2.2.1 Using slacktrack with official .build scripts 2.2.2 Writing your own .build scripts for slacktrack 2.2.2.1 Making use of slacktrack's environment variables 3.0 slacktrack in operation 3.1 How slacktrack finds which files have been installed 3.1.1 installwatch's author 4.0 Example scripts 4.0.1 non-slackware example build scripts 4.0.2 slackware example wrapper build scripts 5.0 Known problems/features of slacktrack 6.0 New features 7.0 Licence 1.0 Preamble --------- I used to work for a company that provided web hosting and shell accounts. When I started there were a number of shell servers all running various releases of RedHat Linux, in various states of repair. I managed to convince the management to let me try Slackware on there instead because I have a much stronger understanding of how to maintain and build server using the Slackware distribution. This trial went well and within a few months all servers were converted to Slackware version 8.1. In order to ease the speed of installation (and to prevent against forgetting to install or configure something critical), I wrote a set of post installation scripts that upgraded Slackware packages, configured numerous config files and copied pre-compiled software (such as courier IMAP) onto the new system. For other software that I could not simply copy, I'd compile it on the new server. However, it soon became clear that due to security updates and so on, it became incredibly time consuming (not to mention seriously boring) to compile PHP, Apache and so on on every server. At this point, I began to investigate how to create packages for Slackware. 2.0 Slackware packages ------------------ The Slackware Linux distribution consists of a variety of 'packages' that make up the distribution. These packages are in '.tgz' format (a gzipped tar archive). Once you have initially installed Slackware from the installer screen, you have the facilities to install, remove or upgrade new or existing packages using the package management tools: installpkg - install 'package.tgz' upgradepkg - upgrade existing 'package' with the new version specified at the command line. removepkg - remove specified package Whilst the Slackware package system is not especially feature rich, Slackware's user base (including me) like it because it is simple. If we want to write our own package utilities then we can easily do so by examining the existing package tools and querying and amending the package database (text files). 2.0.1 Format of official Slackware packages ------------------------------------- In Slackware 8.1 and up, each package .tgz is named as follows: packagename-version-architecture-buildnumber.tgz 2.0.1.1 Package names ------------- The package name is either the name of the single program or the name of a collection of utilities that fall under a single umbrella. For example: autoconf-2.54-noarch-1.tgz That is the name of the autoconf package I have on my Slackware 8.1 box. 'autoconf' is the name of the the entire collection of binaries and associated documents that are extracted from the autoconf source distribution archive. However, if we consider another example: tcpip-0.17-i386-15.tgz There is no single piece of software called 'tcpip'. This package contains a number of associated utilities written by different authors but bundled into one single 'package'. 2.0.1.2 Version numbers --------------- If the package is the name of a particular piece of software such as 'autoconf' from the example above, then the version number represents the version number that its authors distribute. If the package is a 'bundle' such as 'tcpip' then the version number increases as and when you add a new piece of software to the package, or upgrade a particular piece of major software contained within the package. For example, with 'tcpip' above, the 0.17 refers to the version of Linux Netkit. However, there are other programs included within the Slackware tcpip package that are not part of 'Linux netkit'. 2.0.1.3 Architectures ------------- The architecture is just that -- it tells you which architecture the package is for. The current values in use are: ----- [ Official Slackware architecures ] noarch - Architecture independent files such as config files i386 - packages for the x86 (Slackware v8.1 & 9) i486 - packages for the x86 (Slackware 9.1+) i586 - packages for the x86 s390 - packages for the IBM s/390 mainframe Note: Whilst Slackware v10 is primarily built for i486, you may find that there are some packages whose architecture versions are higher than i486. This is for two reasons: [a] There is no source for the package - it is a repackaged binary distribution (SUN's j2sdk is an example). [b] The package is not required or otherwise not suitable for earlier revisions of the architecture (this is especially the true with ARM and SPARC). ----- [ Unofficial ports of Slackware ] arm - packages for the ARM architecture sparc - packages for the SUN Sparc architecture powerpc - packages for the PowerPC architecture 2.0.1.4 Build numbers ------------- A build number suplements the version number and is changed when the *package maintainer* makes a change to the package but the original source code and version number remains the same. For example, I build a package of 'foo' version 0.14 for the sparc. I have never built this package before, thus it becomes foo-0.14-sparc-1.tgz However, I realise that I haven't configured the 'bar' parameter correctly in /etc/foo.conf. I fix it and re-build the package. The package is now named foo-0.14-sparc-2.tgz 2.1 An overview of the creation of official Slackware packages ----------------------------------------------------------- This section gives a brief introduction of the two methods of used when building the official Slackware .tgz packages. 2.1.1 'Clean' and 'dirty' builds -------------------------- I am assuming the reader has some experience with Makefiles and has compiled and installed a number of software packages. 2.1.1.1 Clean builds ------------ I term a 'clean' package one where you can specify a variable to the 'make install' which contains the directory you wish to install the package in, rather than installing it properly over the root file system. For example: # ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc # make # make install DESTDIR=/tmp/package-foo With a 'Makefile' that honours the DESTDIR variable, this will install the whole package into /tmp/package-foo. This directory effectively is the 'root' directory '/' as far as the Makefile is concerned. From here you can use the Slackware 'makepkg' program and build a .tgz. This is by far the safest and most preferred method by all users that make packages. You will find that DESTDIR is called prefix, TOPDIR and other names; you need to examine the Makefile scripts in order to determine whether it contains this functionality and if it does, then discover what the variable name is. 2.1.1.2 Dirty builds ------------ A 'dirty' build is the name I give to source distribution archives whose Makefile scripts do not have any provisioning to install in an alternate directory other than root. For these type of builds, you will typically do: # ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc # make # make install The package will then be installed on the root filesystem. So how do you know what files were installed where and even if you did, how do you pull all these files together in order to run makepkg over them ? That's the purpose of slacktrack! :-) 2.1.1 SlackBuild and .build scripts ----------------------------- Slackware has a number of packages by a great number of authors. Some of the packages's source Makefiles honour a DESTDIR type variable but others do not. 2.1.1.2 SlackBuild scripts ------------------ SlackBuild scripts can be 'interesting'. They are scripts that install into a 'clean' environment (usually /tmp). Some of the scripts follow the make install DESTDIR= style, if the Makefile permits. Others have a 'framework' or 'controller tarball' which is a _packagename.tgz (note the prefixing underscore). The SlackBuild script uses the Slackware 'explodepkg' script to untar the contents of the _.tgz into the /tmp-package directory. Slackbuild then runs 'make' to compile the binaries and libraries, but then uses the 'cat' program such as: # cat foobar > /tmp/package-foobar/usr/bin/foobar By using 'cat', the *new* version of 'foobar' retains the original permissions and ownerships that are in the controller tar ball. However, you may be wondering how, if the package does not have a facility to install into somewhere other than root, do we get the file names and permissions for the controller _.tgz in the first place. The answer is simple: [a] find all files on the file system and dump to a file. [b] compile and install the software [c] find all files on the file system and compare the file produced by the first 'find'. After a little pruning, you have the list of files for the controller tar ball. 2.1.1.3 .build scripts --------------- For those software distributions whose Makefile does not hounour the DESTDIR type system, there are Slackware's .build scripts. These scripts literally ./configure ; make ; make install and copy docs and other goodies into the root file system. One of the problems with these scripts is that they are often incomplete -- they build and install the package but do not gzip the man pages or strip the binaries and libraries; this is done manually afterwards. *These* are the scripts that slacktrack and altertrack were written for. * Note: Whilst some software's Makefiles may appear to honour the DESTDIR variable, the Makefile *may* be broken which can result in files missing or corrupt within your new package. For example: I built Apache v2.0.48 and built a package using make install DESTDIR. However, a problem exists in that some of the Perl scripts it installs have *temporary build paths* hard coded into the resulting scripts. This is why you *may* find a .build instead of a SlackBuild script within Slackware's source tree. However, the primary reason is because the build script just hasn't been updated to make use of DESTDIR. * 2.2 slacktrack in the scheme of things ---------------------------------- I follow Slackware-current quite closly. Often I want to 'back port' a -current package to Slackware 8.1. I can't simply upgrade with -current's .tgz because it was compiled for a newer GLIBC than Slackware 8.1's. For packages that use a 'clean' 'SlackBuild' script, this is an easy job -- I simply run 'SlackBuild' on an 8.1 box. However, for .build scripts, I needed a way of building packages using Slackware's .build scripts. I found a great program called 'CheckInstall' which fulfilled most of my requirements. However, as time went on and I started building more of Slackware's packages and writing my own build scripts, I found that checkinstall was lacking some features that I required. At this time I was also considering porting Slackware to run on the Acorn StrongARM RiscPC series of computers and helping with the Splack (Slackware on SPARC project), and therefore wanted a robust program that can deal with every .build script I threw at it, and if it can't handle it, I needed to be able to make modifications. The easiest way of doing this was to write my own script; and thus 'slacktrack' was born. slacktrack is based on the *idea* behind 'CheckInstall', but uses only my own code (and contributions from other users), and only contains Slackware-specific facilities -- it can not build Debian or RedHat packages and never will. slacktrack does not have all of the facilities of CheckInstall either, but then these are not required for building Slackware packages from .build scripts. Also, slacktrack only works with 'official' Slackware directory locations and /usr/local. For example, if your make install installs binaries in /opt/packagename/bin and the man pages in anywhere other than /usr/man or /usr/local/man, then slacktrack's relevant options (eg stripping libs, bins, gzman) will not detect them. 2.2.1 Using slacktrack with official .build scripts --------------------------------------------- Building a replicar Slackware .tgz from a .build script is typically fairly trivial with slacktrack. If we wanted to build slackware-current's fetchmail, we could do # cd slackware/slackware-current/source/n/fetchmail # slacktrack -jefkzp "fetchmail-6.2.0-i386-2.tgz" "/bin/sh -x fetchmail.build" The resulting package (by default) be stored in /tmp/built-slackwarepackages/ As already mentioned, some of the Slackware .build scripts are incomplete with regard to gzipping man pages, stripping binaries and so on -- fetchmail.build is one of them. Therefore you can specify various options to slacktrack that will take care of this for you. The options in the example above : j - compress libraries e - chown root.bin /bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin directories f - chown root.bin files in the binary dirs listed above k - strip binaries found in the binary dirs listed above z - gzip man pages p - the resulting Slackware package .tgz name The way I re-create the packages is to build a 'trackbuild' script that launches slacktrack with the required options and the name of the Slackware .build script. You can find examples of such scripts within the separate examples archive that is available at http://www.interlude.org.uk/unix/slackware 2.2.2 Writing your own .build scripts for slacktrack ---------------------------------------------- There isn't any specific that you have to do to write a build script for use with slacktrack -- the script name specified to slacktrack doesn't even have to be a script - it can be a binary - as long as it is executable, it is acceptable. You can see some of my own build scripts that I have written for use with slacktrack by looking in the separate example archive that is available at: http://www.interlude.org.uk/unix/slackware 2.2.2.1 Making use of slacktrack's environment variables ------------------------------------------------- slacktrack exports two environment variables: SLACKTRACKFAKEROOT and SLACKTRACKSCRATCHDIR SLACKTRACKFAKEROOT: The purpose of this to allow your .build script to access the 'root' directory of the package contents which otherwise would be difficult for your own build script to locate during the build. One of the main reasons that you would want to know this is to 'brute force' strip binaries, libs or gzip man pages -- it saves you having to know the names of the files in advance. For example: gzip all the package's man pages in /usr/man # find ${SLACKTRACKFAKEROOT}/usr/man -type f -print0 | xargs -0 gzip -9 SLACKTRACKSCRATCHDIR: The purpose of this variable is to provide some temporary space to untar your source archives and so on. slacktrack will manage the creation and deletion of this directory. For example: # cd ${SLACKTRACKSCRATCHDIR} # tar zxvvf ${ORIGPATH}/source/foobar.tar.gz You can see in some of the example 'non-slackware' scripts how I have used these variables 3.0 slacktrack in operation ----------------------- The basic event flow is as follows: [1] Parse command line arguments -> Check they are OK, if not bomb out [2] Launch the supplied build script [3] Run any specified functions (eg gzman, strip bins, chowns) over the package 'root' directory and contents [4] Run Slackware's 'makepkg' program over the package contents [5] Move the .tgz to the specified build store path [6] Scan for any hard links that may be in the package -> If any found, alert the user on screen and also log to a packagename.hardlinks.log file in the build store path The slacktrack shell script is fairly simple and well commented; it should be relatively easy for anybody who understands bash to quickly comprehend what is happening and why. 3.1 How slacktrack finds which files have been installed ---------------------------------------------------- In order to track the files and directories that have been installed or changed, slacktrack uses a shared object (library) called 'installwatch' (which is included with the slacktrack package). slacktrack launches the supplied build script name via the installwatch library. For a detailed description of how installwatch works, please read installwatch's documents that are included with the slacktrack binary package distribution. /usr/doc/slacktrack*/installwatch* In essence, however, what happens is that installwatch re-locates created and modified files and directories into another directory. For example, if your script does: # mkdir /etc/foobar # echo "hostname foo.bar" > /etc/foobar/foo.conf if you pause the script and look in /etc, you will *not* see a directory named 'foobar'. Instead, installwatch has created it in /var/tmp/*slacktrack*/TRANSL/etc/ (the '*slacktrack*' name is created by slacktrack before it launches the build script and is deleted afterwards). By doing this, it allows slacktrack to execute 'makepkg' over the entire directory and turn it into a package. 3.1.1 installwatch's author --------------------- I have taken the installwatch that is included with the latest release of 'CheckInstall' installwatch was originally written by Pancrazio `Ezio' de Mauro but is now maintained by Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran installwatch's page....: http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/installwatch.html checkinstall's web site: http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/ I suggest that you take a look at CheckInstall if you haven't already -- it may have some features you think are 'missing' from slacktrack. 4.0 Example scripts --------------- Included with the slacktrack binary distribution are a number of example scripts that hopefully should provide you with a basis of how to use slacktrack to build from 'dirty' source distributions. 4.0.1 non-slackware example build scripts ------------------------------------ These are full build scripts written by myself -- the only thing they are missing is the source code to the program themselves, but you can run 'download.source' to download it if you wish. I have tried to include a small number of packages that range from basic ./configure ; make ; make install scripts to the more complex such as qmail so as to give you an idea of how you might use slacktrack for various packages. I make no claims that the way in which I build packages is in any way better than anyone else's - if you think some of my methods are inefficient then that's fine, but please don't bug me about it -- I'm not really interested in the build scripts - they're almost disposable and just save me doing it manually. On the other hand if you find something that's inefficient in slacktrack then I *am* most certainly interested! :-) You can find my example scripts in separate examples archive available at http://www.interlude.org.uk/unix/slackware 4.0.2 slackware example wrapper build scripts --------------------------------------- The way I build packages using Slackware .build scripts is to write a 'wrapper' script (a 'trackbuild') that calls slacktrack and passes it the Slackware .build script. The wrapper scripts can be found in the separate examples archive available at http://www.interlude.org.uk/unix/slackware I have not included the original Slackware .build script because it's best if you download these (along with the sources) from the current Slackware source tree. For example, if you wanted to build fetchmail using my wrapper script you would download from ftp.slackware.com, pub/slackware/slackware-current/source/n/fetchmail contained within the 'fetchmail' directory is the fetchmail.build script, the slackware description file and the sources. You may notice that for my Python and lftp build scripts, I have made the 'trackbuild' update the Slackware .build script. As you build Slackware packages from these .build scripts, you too will most likely find some oddities that need fixing. Please do NOT report these to Slackware as being broken -- they aren't - the missing bits (eg Python's hard link in /usr/bin) are fixed manually. 5.0 Known problems/features of slacktrack ------------------------------------- Current problems: [1] slacktrack doesn't have sufficient error checking. I'm in two minds about *where* to put error checking, you see. Do I go no further if the supplied build script exits with a non-zero value? No, that's a bad idea because what if you didn't write the build script? it might be one of these qmail type binary installer programs that you can't (easily without hacking the source) fix. The author may have their own systems, and the program exits with a value that their own controller script recognises as non-failure. What should I do if makepkg has failed? You see it on screen and in the logs anyway, plus makepkg is one of the last things that slacktrack calls -- how can you recover? That said, version 1.03 now has some error handling. There's still not enough though, imo. [2] Inherent problems due to the use of the installwatch program File remapping problem: Due to the way slacktrack uses installwatch, you'll find that some programs fail when you compile and install them according to the documentation provided by its author(s). For example, if you compile and install qmail via # make setup check you will see that qmail fails to install. The reason is that the 'check' tries to verify the files exist and does some other checks. Whilst it can *find* the files, installwatch is 'pretending' they are there, and when the check function probes further, it finds they aren't (because they are in /var/tmp/somewhere) Static utilities cause some files to be missing: In some older versions of Slackware, /bin/ln was compiled as a static binary. This prevented installwatch from being able to overload the normal functions (that a dynamically linked ln would use) with its own. This resulted in symlinks being lost. Fortunately Slackware 8.1 and newer have a dynamically linked version of ln. However, it's worth pointing this out because it may affect other programs that your build scripts call. * If you would like to use slacktrack but are finding that you are having difficulty due to these problems, I recommend that you try altertrack which is included with slacktrack. * [3] No support for a default config file I don't see the point. Each .build script is different and although I typically use the same options to slacktrack for most of my build scripts, I don't see why I'd need a config file just to save 4 bytes or so in a trackbuild wrapper :-) 6.0 New features ------------- See the TODO file in the docs directory. If you have any specific features you would like to see included, or have found any bugs, please email me 7.0 Licence ------- slacktrack is distributed under the GPL version 2. The included software 'installwatch' is also released under GPLv2.