Tukaani pkgtools
Tukaani pkgtools is a fork of Slackware pkgtools. Tukaani pkgtools are no longer developed, but the code is available here just in case someone is interested, and maybe even wants to continue development.
The original reason to fork Slackware pkgtools was to add support for compressors other than gzip, specifically lzma. Nowadays Slackware pkgtools support gzip, bzip2, lzma, and xz, so one doesn't need Tukaani pkgtools for other compression formats anymore. However, there were lots of other improvements in Tukaani pkgtools:
- upgradepkg is significantly faster, especially with large packages.
- installpkg and upgradepkg accept FTP and HTTP URLs
- installpkg --warn compares the package content to the file system contents, and displays what would actually be overwritten if the package is installed.
- pkgtool can download and install or upgrade packages (roughly comparable to e.g. slackpkg or slapt-get). This feature can be used either via menus or non-interactively from the command line.
- makepkg can set all files to root:root 0755/0644 in the package even when not run as root (and without fakeroot). This eases building packages as non-root.
- viewpkg for viewing package information and file list
- convertpkg to convert between compression formats
- explodepkg can extract also .deb and .rpm packages (without rpm2tgz or rpm2cpio)
- makerepo makes it easy to create your own Slackware compatible package repository.
- Keeps a log when packages have been installed, upgraded, or removed.
- Improved parsing of command line options in several tools
- Various reliability improvements
See also the screenshots.
Tukaani pkgtools had practically perfect compatibility with the original pkgtools. Achieving this required continuous effort to stay up to date with things happening in Slackware Current. Since Tukaani pkgtools are no longer maintained, it is not safe to install them on recent Slackware versions.
Probably it wouldn't require huge amount of work to get Tukaani pkgtools up to date again. If someone is interested to continue development of Tukaani pkgtools or even trying to get some of the improvements into Slackware pkgtools, Lasse is happy to give some help, but probably won't have time to do any actual development.
Download
In 2007, Tukaani pkgtools 1.2.4 supported recent versions of Tukaani, Slackware, Zenwalk, Vector Linux, and Slamd64 distributions. It's not 2007 anymore, and it is not safe to install Tukaani pkgtools on a recent release of Slackware or Slamd64.. These pkgtools binary packages are provided mostly for historical reasons.
If you happen to have an old Slackware installation (10.x, maybe 11.0), and want to try Tukaani pkgtools:
- Make sure you have ncurses package installed. Tukaani pkgtools package doesn't include any terminfo files like some old Slackware versions used to do.
- Download the package below and use upgradepkg (not installpkg) to install the package. Don't install or upgrade anything else at the same time.
pkgtools-tukaani_1.2.4-i486-1.tgz
pkgtools-tukaani_1.2.4-x86_64-1.tgz
Source code (including GNU tar 1.13, dialog, and SlackBuild) are available as a single tarball:
There is also a Git repository, which includes a few minor fixes made after 1.2.4 was released:
git clone https://git.tukaani.org/pkgtools.git