The first goal I had in mind when creating urpkg was to prevent installation programs from overwriting files or getting suid behind my back. I did not want to let the program run as root for a task as delicate as installing a program. So that's the first idea: complete control over what gets installed and how. You may trust your package manager, but do you trust all the installation scripts of all the programs you are ever going to install, remove and upgrade ?

The second goal was to be able to uninstall any software, even if there is no available package (for example for development versions), make uninstall target, or other means of uninstalling it. Urpkg lets you run any command, and then remove all files generated by that command easily. This way it is much easier to install software from source or to create packages for your favorite distro in an automated way, much like checkinstall.

By the way, since version 1.4, you can easily create Slackware packages using urpkg. See the section called “Creating a Slackware package”

In short, urpkg can be used to...