Hi all,
At least temporarily I am going to take over the maintenance of slackpkg+, the extension to slackpkg which allows you to manage the installation and upgrade of Slackware packages from 3rd-party repositories.
Slackpkg+ is developed by Matteo Rossini (zerouno) but zerouno has not been able to contribute for the past couple of years. As a consequence, slackpkg+ has some issues when used in Slackware-current.
It’s impossible to communicate with him directly so I had some conversations with his family in the past which resulted in my maintenance-takeover of his other product, slakfinder.
And now I am welcoming pull requests and patches for my fork of slackpkg+. I want to have a release as quickly as possible, taking care of open issues.
Note: zerouno was working on an enhanced version of slackpkg+ which could communicate with slakfinder. The code for that slakfinder API has never been published even though you can find a ‘dev’ version of a slackpkg+ package which contains the calls to that API.
Therefore I am going to ignore the ‘devel’ or ‘test’ version of slackpkg+ which can be found in zerouno’s repository. I will accept patches and pull requests only for the ‘master’ branch.
When zerouno is able to resume his work again, I will gladly hand maintenance back over to him. I am not a software developer but I appreciate properly working tools.
Hope to see some suggestions soon.
Eric
Update 20250301:
I have released slackpkg+ 1.8.1 which addresses the most glaring issues due to the changes in Slackware-current over the past three years.
The repository at https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus/ has been updated. I kept the https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/ URL for backward compatibility.
See also https://github.com/alienbob/slackpkgplus/releases for the release notes and the git commits.Update 20250304:
I released slackpkg+ 1.8.2 which includes all fixes and pull requests that were available. Please share any remaining bugs but also improvement proposals.
This is geat news! I was a bit concerned about the future of slackpkg+ as You told us about zerouno was not able to work on it. I hope this will help to develop the tool
I got one thing that is not exactly problem of slackpkg+ – but I noticed lastly that it does not work propebly with SBO pointing to cgit of ponce sbo repo. As far as I could figure it out – the problem is that ponce has no longer cgit interface running (page loads empty) – switching to SBO 15.0 repo works as expected, but this clouds a bit the picture if one is on -current – just a report – I don’t have a patch for this as propably there need to be a change on ponce side.
Ponce’s cgit is now back online
It was temporarily turned off due to being attacked by DDoS
That’s great to read – I was worring that it will be permanently off as the error was s
appearing for quite some time. Thnak You.
Hello,
one thing to consider is that slackpkg+ makes use of the variable VERBOSE internally, but now the same variable is used in slackpkg and with a different format of the content.
Personally I’ve edited the slackpkg+ to use VERBOSEPLUS, but most likely a more elegant solution can be found
Hey thanks for that. Any chance of doing a blog post(s) on these two tools and how you use them? Thanks
brian-in-ohio
Read this article and follow the links it contains: https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/mirror-for-slackpkg-and-slakfinder/
great!
Very good. No doubt your work will bring great improvements to the code. Thanks
Thanks for taking this on, and all the best to zerouno.
Thank Eric, slackpkg with slackpkg+ is my preferred package management tool.
I’m still figuring out GitHub. I have a fork, made changes in my fork (chrisretusn/slackpkgplus). It looks as I correctly submitted a pull request to your fork, at least it shows up. My first attempt ended up in zero’s slackpkgplus.
great news! Welcome Eric.
Hi Eric,
This is very kind of you
Thank you.
I have released slackpkg+ 1.8.1 which addresses the most glaring issues due to the changes in Slackware-current over the past three years.
The repository at https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus/ has been updated. I kept the https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/ URL for backward compatibility.
See also https://github.com/alienbob/slackpkgplus/releases for the release notes and the git commits.
Hi Eric,
Today https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus/ has slackpkg+ 1.8.0 from 2022.
Maybe an issue with a backup script or with mirroring?
Thank you.
Tsk… indeed a mirrorscript. I have disabled the mirroring from slakfinder.org and restored the correct repository content to slackware.nl as well as to us.slackware.nl.
Thanks for spotting the error and reporting!
Hi Eric,
I think the change for SBO to: SBO[‘current’]=https://github.com/Ponce/slackbuilds – gives the same effect as cgit interface I was talking above:
=== problme here ===
Package List
2025-03-03 10:01:53 URL:http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/slackware/slackware64-current/FILELIST.TXT [1566388/1566388] -> “/tmp/slackpkg.3ZPf59/FILELIST.TXT” [1]
basename: missing operand
Try ‘basename –help’ for more information.
Package descriptions
=== end problem ===
This is effect of empty files or noproper files. The cgit interface of ponce repo works now
Just reporting this small issiue
You make a GREAT work
Thank You 
Ponce’s git repository works here, but the URL you show (http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/slackware/slackware64-current/FILELIST.TXT) may cause the problem if it resolves to a server that does not respond or no longer contains a Slackware mirror.
Anyway, if you can provide a fix for the basename error I can apply that.
Actually Ponce’s git repository does not work at all, I still used the cgit URL…
The parsing logic which slackpkg+ needs to use for https://github.com/Ponce/slackbuilds/ is completely different from what’s currently there for https://cgit.ponce.cc/slackbuilds/ .
I know that Ponce would like us to stop hammering cgit.ponce.cc so I’ll have to look into the code that parses the cgit web pages to understand what zerouno was doing there and then I need to rewrite that parser to run against github.com/Ponce pages.
Not trivial.
Thanks Alien Bob for updating this useful tool! This tool combined with your script `gen_repos_files.sh` makes it possible to create a local Slackware repo and use it w/ `slackpkg` and this slackpkg+ add-on to update custom packages or packages built with slackbuilds(.org) scripts.
Really wishing Slackware would have provided this type of functionality ootb many years ago but it doesn’t, so this is definitely the way go for keeping multiple servers updated from a central local or 3rd party repo. It’s one area where other distros simply do better ootb, with their ability to easily add custom local or 3rd party repos to use w/rpm, yum, apt, etc.
Hi Eric,
I have only used slackpkg in Slackware VMs since years, and never slackpkg+
This not withstanding I do realize how much the many users of slackpkg+ will benefit of your work and time to maintain it, so a big Thank You from me too. And the best to zerouno.
Thanks Eric!
I appreciate all the work you have done for the community.
Eric, thanks! I was also worried slackpkg+ might rot away and glad to see you’re maintaining it until (hopefully) zerouno is able to take it back. Whether he is able to or not, I wish him well.
I use slackpkg on both 15.0 and -current, but slackpkg+ only on 15.0, so while I’ve seen LQ posts about recent issues with slackpkg+ before you took it on, I hadn’t run into problems myself until seeing the same error with 1.8.1 reported on LQ. I’ve fixed it temporarily by adding the bit of code that Ponce suggested to slackpkgplus.conf (thanks Ponce!), and see on Github you’re getting that fix into the package.
And thanks for 1.8.2
Hello AlienBOB or Eric,
there is a mistake in the 20250404: it is 20250304.
If someone has notice, I am sorry.
appo
You’re right, I have fixed that date. Thanks.
Any ETA on rewriting the parser to run against github.com/Ponce pages?
Which Ponce pages? I rewrote the parser for SBo-current git, does it not work?
Perhaps I have the line wrong in my conf file. It currently reads:
SBO[‘current’]=https://github.com/Ponce/slackbuilds/
But when I run: slackpkg download powershell
I receive the following…
[1/1] Package: powershell-7.4.6-sbo-current
https://github.com/Ponce/slackbuilds/plain/system/powershell/:
2025-03-27 08:31:43 ERROR 404: Not Found.
mv: cannot stat ‘slackbuilds/plain/*/powershell’: No such file or directory
Downloaded in /var/cache/packages/SBO_current/system/powershell
ERROR – Package not installed! Not found error!
==============================================================================
WARNING! One or more errors occurred while slackpkg was running
——————————————————————————
powershell-7.4.6-sbo-current.: Not found
Ah! Thanks, I had tested the “slackpkg search” functionality but not “slackpkg download”.
Feel free to share a patch if you want to have this fixed ASAP, otherwise I will add it to my TODO and eventually I will get to it,