• A bug where sbotools unsafely assumed the existence of /tmp/SBo has been fixed (this looked like “readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle $tsbo_dh” with some other details afterward).
• Support for $TMP being set in the environment has finally been implemented. SlackBuild files make use of this info, or fall back to /tmp/SBo; previously, we would not honour user changes to $TMP so all scripts used /tmp/SBo, which may not be what the user expects.
• A bug where trying to install something which doesn’t exist threw a meaningless error has been fixed (this looked like “Odd number of elements in hash assignment” with some other details afterward).
• A bug in the requirement checking code which could match something which was not a perl module against something installed via the cpan has been fixed.
• A bug which would, in certain conditions, cause the queue to be generated out-of-order, which could cause builds to fail to sboinstall trying to build something before its requirement has been built, has been fixed. Thanks to W. Li for reporting this.

An updated slackbuild has been submitted to slackbuilds.org; you can either wait for it to be accepted there then use sboupgrade to update to 1.6 (if you have 1.5 installed), or you can download the slackbuild from there and modify it for 1.6 and use it to update manually.

The local-modification changes are still planned, just with one thing and another, they have not yet been gotten to, but unless we find some more stupid bugs first, that will be the next thing worked on. In theory…

sbotools on dawnrazor.net
sbotools on SlackBuilds.org

• Proper varying exit statuses have been implemented to indicate the cause of the exit. Read the man page for a given command to determine its possible exit codes; if there are none documented, that command can only exit 0. If there are multiple errors, the exit code will be based on the last one encountered prior to exiting.
• Several minor fixes in the way that sboupgrade and sboinstall operate.
• If sboupgrade or sboinstall encounter an error, instead of simply stopping, they will ask if one would like to continue on. In some cases, errors encountered are not sufficient to stop other things from working, so this allows one to have the scripts continue on in order to do as much as can be done.
• A bug where certain special characters in download links broke the downloading of those source files has been fixed.
• A bug where an invalidly formatted file in /var/log/packages would cause sboinstall and sboupgrade to die has been fixed.
• Previously sboupgrade and sboinstall, when set to “make clean”, as well as sboclean, had no knowledge of -compat32 stuff still lying around under /tmp; those items are now properly cleaned.
• A bug where sbocheck would die if there were no updates, instead of exiting cleanly, has been fixed.
• Several non-optimal sections of code have been optimized.

Moving forward, our next big thing is to implement a method of handling local modifications. We also have a couple bug reports to look into, and we’ll also be getting a wiki and some other fun things setup at some point.

sbotools on dawnrazor.net
sbotools on SlackBuilds.org

• When checking for installed requirements, sbotools is now aware of non-SBo packages. This means you can, for example, install jdk from /extra, and sbotools will see that as fulfilling an SBo’s requirement to have jdk already installed.
• When checking for installed requirements, sbotools is aware of CPAN-installed Perl modules. Note that not all CPAN-installed Perl modules register themselves in the system’s perllocal.pod, so sbotools won’t know about them, and in some cases SlackBuilds of Perl modules rename the module in bizarre ways, and sbotools won’t know about such renamings.
• A bug where attempting to build a compat32 package from something which had differing 32-bit and 64-bit download links would fail due to the slackbuild attempting to use the 64-bit source packages has been fixed.
• The requirement to have Text::Tabulate installed for sbotools is no more.
• sbocheck now writes a log, located at /var/log/sbocheck.log, of what updates it finds as available.
• A bug where sbotools was no longer aware of installed compat32 packages from SlackBuilds.org, due to a modification in how these packages get tagged, has been fixed.
• A bug where sbotools could not always “make clean” the source directories, or would do an incomplete job of it, has been fixed.
• sbotools will now attempt to download and md5sum verify all source files for all packages queued before attempting to build any of them.
• A bug where if a source fail already existed but failed md5sum verification sbotools would not remove it before wget’ing a new copy, resulting in the new copy having .1 appended and the md5sum verification still failing, has been fixed.

As I mentioned last release, we’re a lot more organized now, and it has helped a lot.

Moving forward, we’re looking at the different ways we can go about supporting local modifications to the tree, implementing a wiki, doing some refactoring/rewriting/cleanups, and (probably the very next thing we’ll do) implementing a new testing method which we figure ought to expose a number of interesting bugs that we don’t even know about yet.

Exciting!

Moving forward, we’re starting to get a lot more organized now, which should positively impact not only the quality of sbotools but also the speed at which we can effect positive, beneficial changes to the codebase.

enjoy!

So anyway, I started reading golang.org and learning go, but learning from specifications and stuff sucks, so I picked up a copy of Programming in Go. But I also learn from doing my own stuff, so I of course needed to do some things not already in go that really should be done in pkgs – what the rest of the compiled-language world calls libraries, and what the scripting-language world calls modules – so I started hacking up some pkgs to do these things.

All three are now at what I consider a decent state, so I’ve uploaded them to my go-pkgs repo on github. Here’s a breakdown of each:

go-pkgs/find:

My find pkg is something like a go implementation of the find Unix command, or the find perl function. It can do much more than just find by feeding it an appropriate function – like the perl implementation. Currently it has helpers to find anything whose name matches a given regex and to find any directory whose name matches a given regex. There will be additional helpers in the future. Eventually this pkg will probably do concurrency, once I get to that chapter in Programming in Go (my understanding of how to do it exists but is pretty loose at present).

go-pkgs/slog:

My slog pkg utilizes the cgo mechanism to provide the ability to log to syslog with the facility specified, which is oddly missing from go’s log/syslog pkg. This pkg does *not* support syslog options at present, simply because I haven’t implemented them yet. Eventually this pkg will probably be object-oriented… once I get to that chapter in Programming in Go. See above.

go-pkgs/date:

Warning: Rant. This was spawned from my only real criticism of go thus far: its time pkg, and specifically, the time.Time.Format method. Where it mentions UnixDate? Referring to a format you can get back, not a format you can use; somehow I thought it meant the traditional Unix date/time format specifiers we all know and, er, love from “man 3 strftime”. Instead, go uses a bizarro-world format where you actually type the date like you want it back – EXCEPT you can only use certain things to indicate certain things – like the strftime format, only different, so you have to learn an entirely new format. For example, 03 means the hour in 12-hour format and 01 means the month in numerical format. And where can you find this crap documented? In the source. My date pkg implements a wrapper around time.Time.Format for formats I’ll use fairly often. I may add to it as time goes by, ie if I need to use a different format that’s not provided by the time pkg already.

It should be noted that I did not look for existing third-party pkgs for these things at all. For one, I just don’t care about anyone else’s implementations, and for two, it’s much more useful to me to figure out how to implement them myself, and how to improve them over time. So these are pretty definitely not the best ways to do these things, and the APIs will change. While is fine, since I’m doing these things form myself, above and beyond all other considerations. But it will be nice if someone else finds them useful.

Among other interesting things, xocel brings to sbotools a queue system, which allows us to implement some pretty nifty stuff that wasn’t as feasible before; some of that is in this release, some wasn’t quite ready yet and will be “coming soon”.

This release does represent a pretty significant changeset, and while we’ve done significant testing to ensure this release runs as expected, it is of course impossible to catch all bugs. Please email one or the other of us with any bugs found; our email addresses can be found on any of the man pages.

There aren’t too many user-visible changes for this release:

• sbofind now has a -q option to show what all would be built for any sbo’s matching the search term.
• When the sbo tree is rsync’s, –delete is now used so that removed files/directories are properly removed from the local tree. If you want to keep something that’s been removed upstream, you’ll need to relocate it outside of the working tree.
• sboupgrade/sboinstall will now seek confirmation/options/etc for each sbo it expects to build before running any slackbuilds.

And that’s probably about it. The great majority of the work for this release centered around the queue system, so not much in the way of new features at present.

sbotools.

Anyhow, the release includes the following changes:

• The devs package is now ignored by default; it generates thousands of thousands of lines of verification failures, when typically udev is being used to manage /dev and so the failures aren’t even applicable. The -d option has been added to not ignore it.
• .new files are now ignored by default for unofficial packages – a bug in the last version caused them to never be ignored for unofficial packages.
• Issues found for unofficial packages weren’t properly counting before, causing pkg_verify to claim there were no issues after claiming there were issues.
• Symlink issues found for packages weren’t properly counting before for either unofficial or official packages.
• A lot of stuff that doesn’t have to be done if not verifying official packages no longer is in those cases.
• osuosl is now the default mirror – the one which pkg_verify will use to pull official file lists if it can’t pull a selected one from /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. This may fix problems where pkg_verify advises the user to run updates because it doesn’t see a patch in the file lists it’s using.
• Man page wording regarding -n option has been corrected.

Thanks go to Roberto for bringing a few of these problems to my attention.

pkg_verify

pkg_verify

These releases fix a bug where TiMidity++ and probably certain other slackbuilds wouldn’t work, because the link contains %2Bs which of course get translated into +s in the actual filename, and sbotools did not previously know that could happen. Other than some extremely minor cleanups along the way, that’s it.

sbotools.

I will be utilizing this for a time to watch for any remaining bugs and eventually submitting sbotools 1.x to slackbuilds.org.

sbotools.