TealPkg

TealPkg: Package management frontend for Slackware Linux

NOTE: This project has been ABANDONED. However, this code is available under an MIT license for anyone who would like to use it as a basis for their own package management tool.

About this Code

During the summer of 2021, we completed a feasibility analysis of Slackware Linux as a potential distribution for use on HPC nodes, servers, and laboratory workstations. The intent of the study was to determine whether or not a small team of people could maintain a software stack for approximately 100 systems, while having complete control of each system. The lack of systemd was a major factor in choosing to evaluate Slackware, since systemd has proven to be a pain point in our existing CentOS 7 infrastructure. A highly cohesive, loosely coupled init system (such as the one found in Slackware) is desirable.

Unfortunately, the need to maintain a significant number of additional packages beyond those included with the distribution proved to be a much larger pain point than the init system. With hundreds of users with various software requests, the coverage of the official repositories was simply too small to be able to meet our needs by itself. Various add-on repositories are available for this distribution, along with a comprehensive set of build scripts available at SlackBuilds.org. However, the lack of standardization of package names within even this one repository was a major impediment to building the required software stack from source.

During the course of the study, I wrote the TealPkg package management frontend after determining that the existing Slackpkg and Slackpkg+ tools did not meet our requirements. After my experience with the TealBuild system (also available here in GitHub), I determined that Bash was not the language to use for this tool. I therefore used Python 3, limiting the use of add-on packages to those which were available in the official repositories for Slackware -current at the time (15.0).

TealPkg was approaching feature parity with Slackpkg as of the time of abandonment. In addition, it was written with several additional major features:

1. Logging was partially implemented, with the objective of having complete transaction logs.
2. GPG checks were significantly hardened compared to Slackpkg, with key fingerprints and official public key distribution channels used to verify that the correct keys were obtained for each repository.
3. For anticipated (at the time) future software set customizations, TealPkg was designed to read and write standard Slackware tagfiles to make it easy to deploy this distribution across multiple systems.
4. Post-transaction script support was integrated, with example scripts provided for LILO and GRUB.

Although ensuring that TealPkg could replace Slackpkg was a design objective, the code for TealPkg is clean sheet and does not build upon Slackpkg (which is written in shell script anyway). The CLI for TealPkg also follows that of Yum/DNF, since the software was created with the intent of supporting refugees from CentOS after the CentOS Stream announcement.

Someone willing to develop Python code could fork this project and make a pretty nice package manager for Slackware, LFS, or really any other distribution.

Original Description

TealPkg is a yum-like tool for Slackware Linux, with an important caveat: an "upgrade" may be a downgrade, since TealPkg is designed to keep the local system in sync with the versions of software available in remote repositories. In the same fashion as yum with the priorities plugin, repositories configured for use with TealPkg all have priority numbers, and packages in higher priority (lower-numbered) repositories mask packages of the same name in lower priority (higher-numbered) repositories.

As of 0.8.0, TealPkg includes transaction protection in case of a disconnected SSH session (SIGHUP).

CLI

tealpkg [options] command [args]

• check-update
• clean {all | metadata | packages}
• info [--available | --extras | --install | --upgrades] [package ...]
• install {package} [...]
• list [--available | --extras | --install | --upgrades] [package ...]
• provides {file} [...]
• remove {package} [...]
• repolist [--enabled | --disabled | --all]
• search {query}
• sync [package ...]

Aliases:

• update --> sync
• upgrade --> sync
• whatprovides --> provides

Options

• -c --config : specifies an alternate configuration file
• -d --debug : sets log level to DEBUG
• -D --dry-run : doesn't actually install, remove, or update packages
• -i --include : includes a previously excluded package
• -q --quiet : suppresses all standard output (implies -y)
• -x --exclude : excludes a package from consideration
• -y --yes : skip all confirmation prompts (implied with -q)
• --enablerepo : enables disabled repositories (comma-separated or '*' for all)
• --disablerepo : disables enabled repositories (comma-separated or '*' for all)
• --refresh : expires all metadata, forcing a refresh
• --version : displays current TealPkg version

Multilib

Enabling:

1. Enable the alienbob-multilib.ini file
2. tealpkg sync
3. tealpkg install compat32-tools
4. tealpkg install *-compat32
5. Reboot to migrate onto the new glibc

Reversing multilib:

1. tealpkg remove *-compat32
2. tealpkg remove compat32-tools
3. Disable to remove the alienbob-multilib.ini file
4. tealpkg sync
5. Reboot to migrate onto the new glibc