Yesterday I published version 1 of SlackRoll, a package or update manager for Slackware Linux. For those who don’t know Slackware very well, Slackware is maintained mainly by a single individual, a man called Patrick Volkerding. It outstands for being a very simple distribution (internally, not simple to use), quite stable and having a very simple package manager (called pkgtools) that doesn’t track any sort of dependencies and doesn’t know about remote repositories. The user needs to download packages by hand as patches or new versions are published, and use the pkgtools to install or upgrade those packages.

While I think slackpkg is a very good tool, I was not fully satisfied by it. In particular, I thought it was a bit slow (it’s a big shell script), I didn’t like its interface (it uses dialog for some operations, lets you see the output of wget when it downloads… in other words, it’s not very uniform) and I also didn’t really like the blacklisting mechanism because removing items from the blacklist had to be done by hand. In my state of partial dissatisfaction I started thinking about creating my own package manager, in the line of slackpkg but fixing its “problems”.

The end result is a Python script that reflecst my view on Slackware package management, with a uniform interface, which works fast enough for me (local operations take less than one second in my system) and which lets you download and install packages and updates automatically and is, I think, quite good at showing you which packages have been added or removed from the official tree.

More Here.