Hi. I'm a longtime developer, new to development on slackware. Discovered pkgtools is the package manager. But it seems that the gui program pkgtool is missing from unraid 4.7.2. The other pkg commands {remove, install, etc}pkg are here and running. So I pulled pkgtool out of the lastest package distibution at http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/a/pkgtools-15.0-noarch-28.txz, put it in /sbin with the other *pkg files, chmod +x, installed dialog, et voila, I have pkgtool for the moment -- at least until the next reboot.

 

pkgtools-15.0-no-arch-23 is installed on my machine. I haven't found an archive of all older versions of slackware packages yet, so I can't confirm whether pkgtools-15.0-noarch-23 was missing pkgtool or not, but the source code for slackware 14.2 (2016) does have it, and the web is littered with references to it. So I expect it should be present.

 

This has caused me to wonder, not only if Lime has removed this package for some reason (anyone know?) and I shouldn't install the latest pkgtools, but how can I know if installing some random package will interfere with unraid itself?

 

Thanks,

- Eric

Edited December 15, 20196 yr by eweitzman

Unraid is a bit different eco system as the typical linux distribution.

Best is to compare Unraid with an appliance, which has everything it needs to run.

 

The maintainer of the appliance (Limetech) ensures that packages are updated and tested as needed when newer versions become available.

Hence there is no real need to have a full fledged package manager such as pkgtools.

 

Newer/other packages are not persistent after a reboot and may even interfere with the operation of the box.

The plugin system makes use of the install/update/remove package scripts of slackware, and that's all that is needed, but here too one has to be careful with what packages are installed together with the plugins.