My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Alien’s SlackBuild Toolkit

Some time ago I posted a blurb about “AST”, which is my “Alien’s SlackBuild Toolkit”. It is a web-based application for people who want to build a package for Slackware and don’t feel comfortable writing a build script. AST will ask you a few questions and then produces a SlackBuild script and slack-desc file which will usually need only small final adjustments.

The SlackBuild script it produced was derived on the template I use for my own scripts (see http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/). Since my previous blog post, I have received feedback from users who wanted to have more choice in the template to use for their scripts.

So, I sat down at the drawing board and expanded AST. The result is that you can now choose from three templates. The default template is still my own, called “web“. The two others are “sbo” which is based on the slackbuilds.org template script, and “bare” which is modeled after the scripts being used in Slackware.

I hope you like it – feedback always welcome.

Have fun! Eric

4 Comments

  1. schultzter

    Wow, that’s cool! I was getting started learning to write slackbuild scripts and this sure smooths the learning curve.

    A couple things I noticed though:
    – A field for the MD5SUM for the source files would be nice since they are often provided and known upfront;
    – i486 and x86-64 are not mutually exclusive so I would re-arrange that whole bit to allow both or either
    – the info file seems to missing information that is provided (i.e.: maintainer)

    Thanks again!

    PS.: I’ve found one example (on slackwiki.org) where uname -m is used to determine ARCH but why isn’t it used by default?!

  2. specialized

    Great Man!!! you’re a god of the slackware heaven, i wish, in a moment of my life, to know all the thing that you know, but im just a little slacky nerd right now, thanx for AST !!!

  3. dgt

    Hello Sir, I am still trying to get Package Creation down for Slackware but am unsure of where to start for backgroud knowledge. I have a good handle on K&R C but is any additional Programming experience required to use AST properly?

  4. alienbob

    Hi!

    If you want to know more about writing SlackBuild scripts, then you could read this article on SlackWiki: http://www.slackwiki.org/Writing_A_SlackBuild_Script for some more background.

    The AST web-application really requires no programming knowledge at all. You only have to fill out a few fields in the form, and AST generates the shell script code that you copy/paste into a file on your local Slackware machine.

    It really helps if you have a knowledge of (bash) shell scripting, but in many cases the SlackBuild script code generated by AST is generic enough that it will work with minor to no modifications.

    You may encounter situations where the program sources which you want to compile into a Slackware package are so clumsily written (or contain bugs) that you have to have some knowledge of C and the ‘patch’ program in order to successfully build a binary. Luckily, such situations are not common.

    Cheers, Eric

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