slapt-get is an

APT Apt. is an abbreviation for apartment. Apt may also refer to: Places * Apt Cathedral, a former cathedral, and national monument of France, in the town of Apt in Provence * Apt, Vaucluse, a commune of the Vaucluse département of France * A ...

-like

package management system A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals w ...

for

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributio ...

. Slapt-get tries to emulate the features of

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

's (apt-get) as closely as possible. Released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

, slapt-get is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

Features

slapt-get builds functionality on top of the native

package tools (installpkg, upgradepkg and removepkg) enabling package query, remote fetching, system updates, integrated changelog information, and many optional advanced features such as dependency resolution, package conflicts, suggestions, checksum and public key verification, and transfer resumption. slapt-get uses the libcurl

cURL cURL (pronounced like "curl", UK: , US: ) is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for "Client URL". History cURL was fir ...

library for transport. libcurl provides support for ftp, ftps, http, https, file:// and other resource types along with transfer resume for incomplete downloads. slapt-get also uses the

GNU Privacy Guard GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite. The software is compliant with RFC 4880, the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are interoper ...

library to validate signatures. slapt-get provides a simple configuration file format that includes an exclusion mechanism for use with the system upgrade option as well as declarations for all desired package sources. Each package source can optionally be tagged with a specific priority in order to override the package version comparison and honor upstream software downgrades as might be the case when Slackware reverts to a previous version of a package.

Dependencies

slapt-get does not provide dependency resolution for packages included within the

distribution. It does, however, provide a framework for dependency resolution in

compatible packages similar in fashion to the hand-tuned method

utilizes. Several package sources and

based distributions take advantage of this functionality. Hard, soft, and conditional dependencies along with package conflicts and complementary package suggestions can be expressed using the slapt-get framework. Adding dependency information requires no modification to the packages themselves. Rather, the package listing file, PACKAGES.TXT, is used to specify these relationships. This file is provided by

Patrick Volkerding Patrick Volkerding (born October 20, 1966) is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Volkerding is Slackware's " Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man". Personal life Volkerding e ...

and is similar to the Packages.gz file in use by

. Several scripts are available to generate the PACKAGES.TXT file from a group of packages. The file format used by

is extended by adding a few extra lines per package. slapt-get then parses this file during source downloads. Typically, third party packages store the dependency information within the package itself for later extraction into the PACKAGES.TXT. The inclusion of this information within the

package format does not inhibit the ability for

pkgtools to install these packages. This information is silently ignored and discarded after the package is installed.

Package sources

slapt-get works with official

mirrors and third party package repositories such as http://www.slacky.eu/. slapt-get looks for support files, PACKAGES.TXT and CHECKSUMS.md5, in the repository for package information. These files provide package names, versions, sizes (both compressed and uncompressed), checksums, as well as a package description. These files can be extended, as discussed in the previous section, to add dependency listings, conflict information, and package suggestions. These files can also proxy for other remote sources by specifying a MIRROR declaration for each package.

GSlapt

GSlapt is a

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

frontend to libslapt, the slapt-get library which provides advanced

package management A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals w ...

for

and its derivatives. Inspired by the functionality present in Synaptic, Gslapt aims to bring the ease of use enjoyed by

and its derivatives to the

world. GSlapt was written primarily to supersede the vlapt (x)dialog slapt-get frontend used by VectorLinux.

Distributions

Besides

, slapt-get and GSlapt are included by several other distributions, including:
Absolute Linux
*

Salix OS Salix OS is a multi-purpose Linux distribution based on Slackware. Goals Salix OS retains full backwards compatibility with Slackware. This enables Slackware users to benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an "extra" sourc ...

* Slamd64 * VectorLinux * Wolvix

References

External links

*
Slapt-get
on SlackWiki {{DEFAULTSORT:Slapt-Get Free package management systems Linux package management-related software Linux-only free software Slackware