A software package is a bundle of related programs that are ready for you
to install. When you download a source code archive, you have to configure,
compile, and install it by hand. With a software package, this has already
been done for you. All that you have to do is install the package. Another
handy feature of using software packages is that it is very easy to remove
and upgrade them, if you so desire. Slackware comes with programs for all
your package management needs. You can install, remove, upgrade, make, and
examine packages very easily.
Before learning the utilities, you should become familiar with the format
of a Slackware package. A package is simply a tar archive file that has
been compressed with gzip. A package is built so that
it can be extracted in the root filesystem.
Here is a fictitious program and its example package:
./
usr/
usr/bin/
usr/bin/makehejaz
usr/doc/
usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/
usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/COPYING
usr/doc/makehejaz-1.0/README
usr/man/
usr/man/man1
usr/man/man1/makehejaz.1.gz
install/
install/doinst.sh
|
The package system will extract this file in the root directory to install
it. An entry in the package database will be created that contains the
contents of this package so that it can be upgraded or removed later.
Notice the install/ subdirectory.
This is a special directory that can contain a postinstallation script
called doinst.sh. If the package system finds this
file, it will execute it after installing the package.
Other scripts can be embedded in the package, but those are discussed more
in detail in the section called makepkg.