Sometimes, you might want to change the default way list2pkg acts, or do something special that list2pkg could not do for you on your package. This section gives some example of things you can do using list2pkg's options.
As mentioned previously, the last step of list2pkg's creation of a package
is to call makepkg
. The --linkadd, --prepend
and --chown options will be passed to it as is.
The install/ directory contains special files the
slackware package management tools use to know how to install the
package. The only file that must exist is
the slack-desc file which gives a plain text
description of the package. The slack-desc file which
list2pkg creates is not especially good in that respect, so you might want
to add your own slack-desc. To do that, you can use the
--slack-desc option.
Another important file is the doinst.sh script, which gets
executed after an installation. You can give your own
custom doinst.sh script using
the --doinst option. List2pkg will then append its own
commands to it.
There are other files which can be in install/ that
list2pkg does not support. Among them are files
like slack-required
or slack-conflicts. You can specify a directory with
other files to copy to install using
the --install-files option.
Once the package tree has been created, you might want to change a few
details. For example, you might want to move all files
in /usr/local to /usr in order to
create a more “standard-compliant” package. List2pkg cannot do
that directly, but it lets you run any script you want once the package tree
directory has been created. The script will be invoked with the tree's path
as first argument. The option to use is --changetree .
List2pkg handles file owners and groups in a peculiar way. For each of the package's file, it will check if its owner or group is “special”. A special owner or group name is not standard and matters enough for it to be re-created explicitly on any system the package is installed on.
If, for example you are creating a package for the cron daemon, you will want the cron user to be created on the target system, since some of the package's file will likely be set user id. On the other hand, the user root is generally not special, since it exists on virtually all UNIX-like systems.
Note that by default, all files in the package will have root as owner and
group, meaning that files with non-special owners or groups will lose them
and be installed with root owner and group on the target system. You can use
the --no-root-ownership to prevent list2pkg from resetting
the owner and group of every file to root.
By default, all user and group names are special except “root” . Any user or group beginning with “urpkg-” or “urpkgrp-” is also considered non-special, for reasons that will become obvious to you if you use urpkg . If you don't you shouldn't have any user or group name formatted that way.
Those default rules can be changed. In fact, they are read from a
configuration file in ${SYSCONFDIR}/list2pkg.conf (by
default /usr/local/etc/list2pkg.conf). You can either
modify that file or override it when calling list2pkg using
the --exclude-ownership option.
The format of the file is simple. Each line contains a regular expression
that will be matched against each owner or group name. Assuming the line's
content is held in the variable EXPR , the matching
Perl code will be the following.
$NAME =~ /^$EXPR$/
If the expression matches, the name will be considered as non-special, otherwise it will be considered special.