Swaret - Keep Slack up-to-date
Swaret has finally been released by Slackware in their Extra's of the slackware-current tree.
From the Swaret developers website (http://swaret.xbone.be./)
Quote:
swaret is a script to help keep your Slackware System up-to-date.
swaret Upgrades, Installs, Removes,... Packages/Patches/Extra Packages. It uses several Slackware Linux Mirrors through http/ftp/rsync or even Local Files. Settings are read from swaret.conf(5) and will be used at runtime.
If you are running Slackware check out the Swaret site as it has a forum to ask/answer all questions you may need to know.
Simply this tool - easily modified through a conf file, allows you to keep your Slack box up-to-date by dragging packages, patches and extra's via a simple command and/or cron job. THe conf file allows you for instance to only grab patches if thats all you want - it is very flexible and easy to understand.
You can choice to either update and patch your existing version (security updates and patches) or live on the bleeding edge and let swaret draw all the files from the slackware-current tree.
I simply run swaret from a cron job weekly and let it do its stuff - it goes away and checks the files on my system and compares those with the files on the server and downloads, installs and checks for dependancies automatically.
For instance if I want the latest version of Gimp on offer from Slackware, and it is available on one of the mirrors ... I just point my conf file at that mirror and type in .... swaret --install gimp .... on the commandline and sit back and before long the latest Gimp offering is on the machine ready to use.
The only drawback I see is the need to run .... swaret --update .... before each update session so as to get the fresh list of new files on the mirror so it can read the difference between what I have and what is on offer ... but a small script to do the "--update" before "--up-all -A" was easy to implement and use.
Old news to Old Slackers but new to me is another handy tool I have found: CheckInstall (found at http://checkinstall.izto.org/). This in not a Slack only tool but can be used on Debian's dpkg and RPM package based systems :)
When I compile a program from source on my Slack box I run the ./configure and make as usual but the next command is "checkinstall" - CheckInstall then goes away and creates a slackware package which is installed with Slackware's package tool (that makes for easy removal later) and stores the freshly compiled package on my system for later use if I remove the package with the removepkg command for whatever reason.
It would also be useful for those who have a number of identical Slack boxes to upgrade, as once compiled the package could be used across the board on these systems and the program only required compiling once.
Anyway if you have a Slackware box and haven't seen these tools before, check them out - they do make life all that much easier in keeping your system up-to-date.
