Spkgtool
The Scrudgeware (Symbolic-Link) Package Tool

Table of Contents

• What is Spkgtool?
• Downloading and Installing
• Documentation
• Ports HowTo
• News
• Copyright Information
• Acknowledgments

What is Spkgtool?

Spkgtool is a software management system that uses symbolic links for maintaining packages and a "ports" style backend for building package from source tarballs. Spkgtool now has it's own built linking application, but it also can act as a GUI front-end to your favorite symbolic link package system (Currently spkgtool supports graft, epkg,and stow). It is written with bash scripts and Makefiles. The GUI is dialog and Xdialog(depending on your enviroment). Aside from building ports, It will also build and install "gnu friendly" source tar balls, provided that they can be installed as follows:

$  tar zxvf <package-name>.tar.gz
$  cd <package-name>
$  ./configure
$  make
$  make prefix=<target-directory>/<package-name> install

What is this Symbolic link idea?

Basically, every software package gets installed into it's own directory and is then linked into the main tree of your system. Here's an exmple using htmldoc:

$ ls -R /usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19
/usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19:
bin  man  share

/usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19/bin:
htmldoc

/usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19/man:
man1

/usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19/man/man1:
htmldoc.1

$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/htmldoc
/usr/local/bin/htmldoc 
    -> /usr/local/pkgs/htmldoc-1.8.19/bin/htmldoc

Downloading and Installing

Downloading

All releases available here

Installing

The configure script should detect which package linking program you are using and "make install" should then install spkgtool using that program according to it's standards. For example if you are using graft spkgtool will be installed into /usr/local/pkgs/spkgtool-$VERISON and then linked into the /usr/local tree with the graft command (pretty sweet huh?).

Use "configure --help" for configuration options:

$ ./configure
$ make install

News

Not all dialogs are created equal. There are alot of versions of dialog, Spkgtool is only designed to work with dialog-0.9a-20010527+. available ftp.us.debian.org.

Opened up a Spkgtool project on Savannah

Released spkgtool-0.2.0pre0

Copyright Information

Copyright (c) 2002 Larry Owen

This software is covered by by the GPL.

Disclaimer

No liability can be accepted. Use at your own risk. As this is beta software, there may be errors and inaccuracies that may be damaging to your system. Although this is highly unlikely, the author(s) do not take any responsibility for that: proceed with caution.