Baslinux mailing list

[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

On Fri, 9 May 2003 qwms-avib AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> keesan2 AT cyberspace.org wrote:
> > 
> > But you do NOT need pkgtool to install packages 
> > or remove them.  You can use installpkg and removepkg.  
> 
> installpkg and removepkg are part of the pkgtool
> package.

I looked at MANIFEST.gz (after unzipping it at my friend's fast server
with a large hard drive).

hdsetup.tgz includes:
pkgtool
removepkg
installpkg
explodepkg
upgradepkg
makepkg - this one looks interesting


Fileutls.tgz includes ls chgrp chmod chown cp dd df du ln mkdir mkfifo
mknod mv rm rmdir touch dircolors sync.  I have used at least half of
these so don't object to installing the whole package.

Tar.tgz and grep.tgz contain tar and grep/egrep/fgrep.

Bin.tgz is the one that I don't want to install all of.  Perhaps I can
make my own package with just the files that I want in it using makepkg?

You suggested I post the more useful files from bin.tgz at my site.
bin.tgz is about 1M download and installs to about 2M (including locale,
doc, man, info files).  Just the useful files would be under 100K.

In my opinion these would be

which - 3.5K
uuencode -5K
uudecode - 8K
rpm2targz - 2.4K

You suggest also installing:
file - 37K  (tests arguments to classify by filesystem, magic number and
language - I have no idea what to do with this one)
zless - used instead of zcat and |less, small
gawk (cannot find this exact name in /usr/bin)
sed - 24K - used by pkgtool
-------
I would also like to add from binutils.tgz   
ar - for unpacking Debian files - 30K? (it needs something else added)
strip (140K or so)  ' Discards symbols from object files'.  It reduced the
foolabs pdftotext binary from 1.7M to 900K. 

(The rest of binutils is things for working with obj files and other
things related to programming.  I have no idea why ar ended up here and
not with rpm2targz in bin.tgz).

Total about 300K or less.  Plus whatever else you suggest adding.
Compressed maybe half this size (150K instead of two 1M downloads).

Can I use makepkg to put all of these binaries into one .tgz file which
installs itself into /usr/bin and is named bin.tgz?  And install this
instead of the standard bin.tgz for BL2?  

I don't care about the man pages, I cannot understand them anyway.  I
don't want the copyrights or changes or locale pages.  I could try to also
collect the more explanatory doc files for the above and put them
somewhere appropriate (in /doc/ somewhere).

This would be educational and might also save time for other people who
are downloading the Slackware packages.

The rest of bin.tgz is things I never heard of:  indent, unarj, zoo,
compress, pbe, at, crontab (these two are used to run programs when you
are not there), diskcopy (is this useful?), zcomp, lnsize, patch, time,
fiz, shar, unshar, sysvbanner, lha, igawk, rpmoffset, batch, todos,
fromdos, apm and apmd (for laptop power management), tput, crond,
makewhatis, hdpam, atd, atrun.  I would rather not have them on my
computer unless I think I have a use for them.  Do I need any of these?

I know it would be quicker and easier to spend money on a CD and use a
larger hard drive, but since when are the people using BL trying to save
time? 

Sindi Keesan