This is a collection of simple shell and Perl scripts intended to aid
in the maintenance of Slackware systems.  There is no documentation,
other than comments in the scripts.  There's nothing here that should
be particularly difficult to understand.


UPGRADE.sh

   This is a script meant to automate periodic package upgrades.
   Run as an unpriviledged user, it will download from an offsite
   repository to a local one, any package updates that are newer
   than the /var/log/packages directory (whose timestamp was touched
   the last time the system had any packages installed, removed,
   or updated).  Then it runs "upgradepkg --dry-run" on the downloaded
   packages, to list which would be installed or not.

   Run as "root" and it finds the latest package updates that have
   been downloaded and runs "upgradepkg" on them.

   This script works great, so long as no new packages get installed
   between patch cycles, but be aware that as coded, it looks also
   for package updates in Slackware's "testing" subset, which may
   not be desirable in all situations.  Adjust the script if you
   don't want it to get "testing" packages, and while you're at it,
   be sure to check and adjust "FTP_HOST" and "DOWNLOAD_BASE".


listdeps.sh

   This simple script attempts to identify which other installed
   packages a given (also installed) package depends on.  Useful for
   duplicating local software installations onto other computers.
   As an example, in order to identify which external packagses are
   installed on a system as dependencies for an application (where
   all other packages are installed with the original OS installation,
   or from routine updates to the OS installation):

      : nemesis[syl] ; listdeps.sh abiword | ( cd /var/adm/packages/;\
              xargs -r grep -hsw LOCATION | cut -d\ -f3 |grep ^\./)
      ./abiword-3.0.7-x86_64-1.tgz
      ./wv-1.2.9-x86_64-1.tgz

   Note that "./" in the above output does not mean that the package
   files in question are in the current directory.  The script does not
   search for the package files.  It only lists the package location
   recorded in the /var/log/packages file for that package (that
   is the path to the package file as it was given to installpkg).
   Note that the last "grep" in the sample command is what matches
   these specific entries.  Otherwise listdeps.sh will gleefully
   list all installed packages that the target package depends on.
   It's up to the user to figure out how to extract useful details
   from the output.


slackware_chlog.sh

   Perhaps the first script that was written among this set of tools,
   this one keeps an eye on the official Slackware changelog, and
   sends daily updates to a configured email address.  Intended to
   be run daily from cron, though note that it should run only as
   an unprivileged user as it writes to a very predictable path
   under /tmp.  Obviously that can be adjusted as needed.


software_monitor.pl

   This script attempts to provide the same functionality on
   Slackware Linux systems as is provided by the anitya script
   found at https://github.com/fedora-infra/anitya.  That is
   to say that it queries the software release database at
   https://release-monitoring.org/ for the latest versions of
   the software packages that it is configured to report on (note
   that this script prioritizes known stable versions of software,
   rather than nightly builds or development releases; I make no
   promises that this is either similar to or different from how
   the anitya script behaves), and compares them to the versions
   installed on one or more local Slackware Linux systems (assuming
   that the software is installed using Slackware's usual package
   installation tools, and thus is recorded in /var/log/packages.
   See https://slackbuilds.org/ for a collection of software build
   scripts that will build Slackware-like packages of third-party
   software).  A report is generated when the local versions are
   found to be out of date.  The intention is to run this from cron
   on a weekly or monthly basis (even daily seems likely to be overly
   frequent), giving the system administrator a reasonable chance of
   keeping locally installed software upt to date.


template.SlackBuild

   This script is largely based on Slackware's own build scripts, but
   also heavily influenced by many scripts found on the SlackBuilds.Org
   website, as well as build scripts by Eric Hameleers, Fred Emmott,
   and many others.  This script makes it possible to very consistently
   create Slackware packages from the source of many applications.
   As the name suggests, though, this is just a template.  The script
   absolutely must be adjusted for each piece of software it's used
   to create a package of, but if I did things well, it should fairly
   easily obvious where edits need to be made.

   Note that this was originally created at a time when I was working
   on porting Slackware linux to a DEC Alpha system (Alphaserver-2100,
   to be precise).  I no longer have that system and the port was
   never complete, though it did work: I had Slackware-10.0 running
   on my Alphaserver for quite a while.  Most folks won't need support
   for all the architectures listed in template.SlackBuild, of course,
   but they remain on the off chance that I might someday revive that
   project (or port to a different hardware platform that I've been
   meaning to work on).

   All the software that I install locally on a Slackware system
   starts with a copy of this script, adjusted for each package.
   Upgrading to a new version of such a package is usually just a
   matter of rebuilding the package, feeding the appropriate version
   number via the "VERSION" environment variable, then using upgradepkg
   to install the upgrade.