My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Mirror for slackpkg+ and slakfinder

For some time now, the slakfinder.org website has been offline. The domain still exists, but the web site just does not respond. Matteo Rossini (zerouno) needed a break from computers, so it is likely that the site won’t return on short notice.

The effect of the site’s unavailability becomes quite obvious if you use the slackpkg+ extension for slackpkg to manage the packages you installed from 3rd-party community repositories. The “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file contains these lines:

?# use this to keep the slackpkg+ package updated to the latest stable release
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+15/

… and that causes a problem every time you run “slackpkg update“. There will be a timeout querying slakfinder.org and a subsequent error. After that, slackpkg will function as usual, you just won’t be able to check on updates for slackpkg+. But the error is annoying.
Luckily I am mirroring the repository for a long while now, so this is easy to fix. Replace the MIRRORPLUS URL above with the following line and run a “slackpkg update“, which will solve the timeout issue:

MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/

Now, slakfinder.org fulfilled another role!
It hosted a web-based Slackware package search tool. That may actually have been used a lot more than the slackpkg+ repository.

Unfortunately there has never been another instance of that package searcher available online, and the only thing I could dig up is a 10-year old Git repository archive for its code at https://github.com/mrossini/slakfinder . The code does not work with PHP 7, it has no documentation and the sparse comments in the code are mostly in Italian. It’s greek to me πŸ˜‰
I thought, “a nice weekend project” and I spent the last few days understanding and then fixing the code. I looked at the repositories that it searched (the Internet Archive luckily created a snapshot early December 2022, right before the site disappeared) and decided to prune that repository collection to just the ones that support Slackware 14.2 and newer, and are known to me. That still leaves 62 repositories.

Today I am opening a custom instance of slakfinder on slackware.nl which will hopefully prevent new downtime. Get a look at it here: https://slackware.nl/slakfinder/ .

I haven’t tested the Guest Book, feel free to leave your comments there as well as in the comments section below. Commenting here on the blog will give you a much higher probability of me answering.
If there’s repositories (Slackware-compatible and for Slackware 14.2 or newer) that you want me to add, let me know.

Enjoy! Eric

36 Comments

  1. Jen

    Alien Bob to the rescue! πŸ™‚

  2. Valentine Christian

    Wow, thanks, Eric!!!!

    • LoneStar

      Well done Eric!
      If you need any help with decoding comments in italian let me know

      • alienbob

        I used Google Translate πŸ™‚ I had to understand those comments first, so that I could make sense of the code.

  3. Konrad J Hambrick

    Thanks Eric.
    Posted a link on LQ
    — kjh

  4. Antoine

    Thanks again Eric, that timeout was annoying and worrisome for those of us who didn’t understand why it was happening.

  5. Tonus

    If it’s possible… Wait… You already made it !

    Amazing !

  6. Michael Langdon

    Thanks Eric!

  7. Nathaniel Russell

    How do we implement this into the slackpkgplus.sh file so that online search inquiry will work again?

    • alienbob

      You can’t. The new online search functionality behind http://slakfinder.org/slfcli.php was never made public by zerouno, and now it is inaccessible. If you find a copy of his code let me know.

  8. David

    Is there any replacement for these lines (which I was using)?
    # use the development branch to use the mainline version and help develop by reporting bugs.
    #MIRRORPLUS[‘slackpkgplus’]=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+dev/

    • alienbob

      I never mirrored the repository containing the package for the development branch, and since slakfinder.org is now permanently down, I am unable to provide a mirror.
      It does not make any difference for you whatsoever – there will not be an update to this ‘dev’ version so you could also remove that URL from the slackpkgplus.conf and then blacklist ‘slackpkg+’.

  9. Marco

    Great work again. Thanks.
    Would you consider adding http://www.slackel.gr/repo/ to the mix?
    And https://slackware.uk/slackonly/ ? Although that one is an old mirror and current there is already 15.0.

    • alienbob

      I will add slackel to the search engine’s repositories but slackonly contains outdated packages and seems un-maintained. Not going to absorb that one.

  10. Marco

    Ah, slackonly is still up:
    https://slackonly.com/pub/packages/

  11. Marco

    Sorry for spamming! πŸ™‚
    https://download.salixos.org/
    could that one be added?
    It’s the only one I know of that has a recent Vice build (GTK3 version), it’s one of the few packages I never succeeded in building myself. And I have to play my old Commodore 64 games!

    • alienbob

      If you already know about the package, you don’t have to search for it. And if you want to manage the package installation, then it is up to you to add the salixos repository to your slackpkgplus.conf file.
      But yes, I am going to add it to the search engine.

  12. Nathaniel Russell

    Awesome

  13. jenner

    Thanks for your work.
    I often used the search tool,
    so i miss https://slack.conraid.net/repository/slackware64-current/.
    Would it be possible to add this repository ?

    • alienbob

      Hi Jenner, no problem, I will add it. Conraid’s repository supports file-search as well, good.

  14. Francisco

    Hi Eric.

    As always, thanks for maintaining Matteo Rossini (zerouno)’s work.

    Those timeouts were not very descriptive and annoying.

    I changed mirror server of course with no success.

    Back to normality now… Thanks again Eric.

  15. TheTKS

    Thanks once again, Eric. I’ve relied on your mirror for slackpkg+ for some time, but occasionally used the search on slakfinder, too. I thank Matteo and wish him the best.

  16. Marco

    At the moment the search seems to be broken, no results what so ever, at least on my side. Cheers, Marco

    • alienbob

      Yeah the update process hung and it had grabbed the mariadb server by the throat. It had also generated a logfile of 197 GB in size during that time πŸ™
      I removed the logfile and that released the database somehow. It works now.

  17. slackjeff

    Hi Eric! Could you provide the source? I would like to make a mirror in Brazil! Unfortunately .nl is too slow for us!
    Thanks for the support!

    • alienbob

      I can’t believe that a text-based site like slakfinder is too slow anywhere. If it seems slow it is because file-based search creates a big SQL query where it just takes a while to return results.
      There’s nothing to download, so nothing to mirror.

  18. tome

    There is a bug at https://slackware.nl/slakfinder for viewing or downloading from SlackDCE Project, for example:

    location is: ./graphics/mtpaint/mtpaint-3.50.09-x86_64-2_dce.tgz/
    should be: ./graphics/mtpaint/

    download is: …/graphics/mtpaint/mtpaint-3.50.09-x86_64-2_dce.tgz/mtpaint-3.50.09-x86_64-2_dce.tgz
    should be: …/graphics/mtpaint/mtpaint-3.50.09-x86_64-2_dce.tgz

    • alienbob

      The bug is not in the slakfinder site or code. It is in the repository metadata provided by SlackDCE and which is imported into the slakfinder database whenever there’s an update.

      The root cause is the PACKAGES.TXT file, see https://slackdce.radioclub.ar/slackdce/15.0/x86_64/PACKAGES.TXT where the “PACKAGE LOCATION” should point to a directory but here it points to the package instead.
      Compare that to a correct repository metadata file PACKAGES.TXT (for instance that of the Slackware package tree) and you will notice the difference.

      • Eduardo (lu9dce)

        I have this in PACKAGES.TXT

        PACKAGE NAME: eflite-0.4.1-x86_64-1_dce.tgz
        PACKAGE MIRROR: http://slackdce.radioclub.ar/slackdce/15.0/x86_64/
        PACKAGE LOCATION: ./accessibility/eflite/eflite-0.4.1-x86_64-1_dce.tgz

        It indicates the mirror and the location where the tgz is within the mirror.

        From what I understand, it should be like this?

        PACKAGE MIRROR: http://slackdce.radioclub.ar/slackdce/15.0/x86_64/
        PACKAGE LOCATION: ./accessibility/eflite/

        If not, give me an example and I will correct it immediately.

        Greetings

        • alienbob

          Hi Eduardo,

          The “PACKAGE LOCATION” should be equal to “./accessibility/eflite” (without the trailing slash) in your example.
          The full download URL for a package is ${PACKAGE MIRROR}/${PACKAGE LOCATION}/${PACKAGE NAME}

          • Eduardo (lu9dce)

            “Ready, thank you. Everything corrected.”

            • alienbob

              Hi Eduardo, I can confirm that slakfinder shows the SlackDCE packages properly now.

  19. Marco

    Slakfinder is down?

    • alienbob

      It’s back now. I messed up an upgrade, simple fix fortunately…

    • Marco

      Thanks!

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