[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

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SlackBuild scripts

A SlackBuild script is a shell script (usually Bourne shell compatible) that automates the process of configuring, compiling and creating a Slackware package (*.tgz, *.txz, *.tbz files) from source archives.

Overview

The basic process of creating a Slackware package from source can be summarized as follows, while details may vary from one build system to another.

  1. Uncompress the source archive (usually .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file) into a “work directory.”
  2. Configure the source, and apply patches if needed.
  3. Compile/build the source and generate the binaries.
  4. Install the program to a temporary directory.
  5. Copy the program documentation and other necessary files to the appropriate subdirectories in the temporary directory. These locations should adhere to default directory structure used by Slackware to store applications installed by the package manager, viz. inside the /usr/ folder.
  6. Use the makepkg utility from the temporary directory (installation location) to create a Slackware package that can then be installed using the installpkg utility.

While the above steps can be done by hand, the process is tedious and involves typing in a lot of commands. Automating the process by a shell script allows the user to share the process with the community at large. It also makes sense to use and modify existing SlackBuild scripts for upgrading the same program to a newer version.

Sources

  • Originally written by V.Harishankar for the SlackDocs Wiki Project
 slackware:slackbuild_scripts ()