src2pkg - trackinstall Copyright 2005-2007 Gilbert Ashley Note: src2pkg was formerly called PkgBuild. Long after starting I discovered that there was already a build-system called pkgbuild. Starting with version-1.0 the name has been changed to 'src2pkg'. src2pkg is a system for creating installable Slackware-type '.tgz' packages from source code or other content, using a simple src2pkg script (really more like a spec file) or by using the command-line tools 'src2pkg' or 'trackinstall'. Both of these tools can also write a script for you, which can be easily customized with extra options or commands. For building packages from pre-compiled sources use the 'trackinstall' tool. It works pretty much like checkinstall, creating a package from content in the current directory. It can also easily create packages from the content created by running common installation scripts like 'install.sh',even if they are interactive scripts. For building most packages from source code, src2pkg is a better alternative as it lets you control and/or document the most common src2pkg options for the whole process. src2pkg can also work directly with SRPM packages. Decompression is handled by the program 'disrpm' which is installed in /usr/bin. It is not necessary to have the 'rpm' package installed. src2pkg can also re-package binary packages such as binary RPM packages and Debian '.deb' archives. Decompression of Debian archives is also handled by disrpm, an excellent program written by . disrpm can even unpack some rpm's where rpm2tgz and rpm2cpio fail. This provides a much better conversion than using rpm2tgz for other reasons as well -src2pkg will check the directory and file permissions to make sure they are Slackware-compatible, move documents and man-pages into the proper directory for Slackware. It will even show you if you have all the required libraries installed on your system for running the program. It also provides a valid slack-desc file to insure that the package can be properly installed and removed using installpkg and removepkg. And it will do this for debian or other binary packages as well as rpm packages. (In fact, it will even repack a Slackware package! While that may sound silly, it makes it possible to easily unpack, verify and repackage possibly faulty packages that you download) After installing src2pkg, you can run 'src2pkg -h' and 'trackinstall -h', or 'man src2pkg' & 'man trackinstall' to see the options available. src2pkg can work with archives already on your system or, if given a valid URL, it will also download the source archive. src2pkg can also be used to update and/or execute existing .src2pkg or .PkgBuild scripts.