/ 
Slackware-SBoKeeper-2.06
River stage zero No dependents
/ README.md

sbokeeper

sbokeeper is a utility for Slackware administrators to help manage installed SlackBuid packages by maintaining a database of added packages and their dependencies. It is not a package manager itself, it could more accurately be described as a package manager helper.

Building

sbokeeper should be able to run on most Unix-like systems, although it probably won't have much use outside a Slackware system.

sbokeeper now has a slackbuild on SlackBuilds.org.

sbokeeper depends on the following:

To build and install sbokeeper:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Please read the documentation for ExtUtils::MakeMaker for more information on configuring the build process for sbokeeper.

Usage

For more in-depth information on the usage of sbokeeper, please consult the sbokeeper manual (perldoc ./bin/sbokeeper or man 1 sbokeeper if sbokeeper has been installed). The information in this section is meant to be a rough overview of the usage of sbokeeper, not an exhaustive catalog of sbokeeper's capabilities.

sbokeeper keeps track of packages by maintaining a package database. The database basically tracks which packages were manually added and what packages they depend on. sbokeeper tries to give the user a large degree of freedom when it comes to manipulating the database, to be compatible with the Slackware philosophy of "the user probably knows what he's doing, let him do whatever he wants."

Getting Started

First thing you are going to want to do is obtain a local copy of the SlackBuilds.org repository. If you are using a SlackBuild package manager tool like sbopkg, then it should clone a repo somewhere on your system. You're going to have to refer to your tool's documentation on where it is. If you are not using any sort of package manager, you will have to clone the repo yourself.

git clone git://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds.git

You will now need to tell sbokeeper where the repo is on your system. You can do that either through the -s option or the SBoPath configuration field.

echo "SBoPath = /absolute/path/to/repo" >> ~/.config/sbokeeper.conf

If you are using one of the following SlackBuild package managers and are using the default repo location then you do not have to do any sort of configuration, sbokeeeper will find the repo itself.

Now you should be ready to use sbokeeper.

To get started, you can use the pull command to automatically find installed SlackBuild packages and add them to your package database.

sbokeeper pull

Basic Usage

Let's say you have a SlackBuild whose dependency tree looks like this:

pkg1
L dep1
L dep2
  L dep2.1
    L dep2.1.1

and you've installed pkg1 and all of its dependencies, but now you'd like to track it with sbokeeper. To add pkg1 and automatically track down its dependencies, you can run this command:

sbokeeper add pkg1

sbokeeper will add pkg1 to database and mark it as manually added, which means you added the package yourself and it wasn't pulled in as a dependency. sbokeeper also allows the user to do things old fashioned way of adding everything manually:

sbokeeper tack pkg1
sbokeeper tackish dep1
sbokeeper depadd pkg1 dep1
...

tack adds packages to the database without trying to automatically add dependencies. tackish (and its sibling addish) do the same thing as their counterparts but the packages are not marked as manually added. depadd adds dep1 as a dependency of pkg1.

Now let's say you're tired of pkg1 and want to get rid of it and all its friends from your system. You removed the pkg1 package from your system, but now need to know which dependencies are no longer needed. With sbokeeper, you would first remove pkg1 from the database.

sbokeeper rm pkg1

pkg1 is now gone, but its dependencies remain. To find out which dependencies are no longer necessary, you can run:

sbokeeper print unnecessary

The print command will print a list of all packages that are a part of a certain category. unnecessary prints a list of packages that were neither manually added to the system or a dependency of a manually added package.

Now let's say that you have removed all of those packages from your system, but now you need to remove them all from your package database. sbokeeper provides an easy way of doing that:

sbokeeper rm @unnecessary

This command removes all packages from your database that a part of the unnecessary category. This @unnecessary is an alias, which is signified by the @ sign. Aliases are command arguments that are automatically expanded into the list of packages it represents.

As stated previously, this was a rough overview of the usage of sbokeeper. More documentation can be found in the manual or the help command.

perldoc ./bin/sbokeeper
man 1 sbokeeper          # sbokeeper must be installed first
sbokeeper help

Why?

Whenever I used Slackware in the past, I would keep track of all my SlackBuilds in a text file that looked something like this:

mpv
-libass
-libplacebo
--python3-meson-opt
---python3-build
----python3-pyproject-hooks
... etc. ...

This was nice as when my systems would amass many SlackBuild packages I could easily tell why a certain package was installed.

The issue with this was that, at some point, maintaining the text file would become too tedious. I would eventually give up on maintaining the file because either:

I eventually came to the realization that many of these problems could be solved if I just automated the whole process with some sort of program. So I got to hacking.

I personally use sbokeeper along with sbopkg. sbopkg handles the actual package management (building, installation, updating) while sbokeeper handles the documenting and tracking of the packages.

Copyright (C) 2024-2025 Samuel Young

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See https://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.