Salix Forums

I see that many members use spkg package manager here. What are the advantages or good features in spkg over slapt-get? Thanks for your comments.

The two are not comparable. slapt-get is a tool for working with the Salix repositories. spkg (and a number of others) can be used to work directly with any package, for instance, one you have built yourself.

Have a look at their man pages.

How is spkg better than installpkg etc?

spkg is just a wrapper for them. It is shorter to type , and has the intuitive switches -i, -u, -d - see the man page.

There are some other tools too, such as pkgtool. They just work in different ways, and not all their functions overlap. The question isn't "which is better", but "which will do the job".

The recommendations of the Salix Startup Guide are a good place to start.

mimosa wrote:spkg is just a wrapper for them

No. spkg is a completely different tool. Written in C, it's much faster than original pkgtools.

spkg is implemented in C and optimized for speed.
You can find some benchmarks here. Here are just a few numbers comparing pkgtools to spkg: installation is at least 4x faster, upgrade is 7x faster and remove is 30x faster on averange.

No. spkg is a completely different tool.

I stand corrected! Is it functionally equivalent, or to put it another way, are there any circumstances under which you might have reason to prefer installpkg & co.? I always use spkg myself, on the rare occasions when I need to install something not in the repos or SBo.

mimosa wrote:I stand corrected! Is it functionally equivalent, or to put it another way, are there any circumstances under which you might have reason to prefer installpkg & co.? I always use spkg myself, on the rare occasions when I need to install something not in the repos or SBo.

Only one case I can think of: installpkg allows you to install several different versions of a package side by side. That is usually a very bad idea because one will overwrite the other, there can potentially be conflicts and you can't actually run each separate version. It is only really useful for installing different kernel packages side by side.

That is very much to the point given rsal's kernel upgrade issue So spkg -i kernel-{packages} would remove the old ones just the same as spkg -u?