For the past year or so, my main computing hobby project has been my unofficial port of Slackware to the ARM architecture. I also developed and maintain a package building utility, ''slacktrack'' which helps produce Slackware-compliant packages from simple build scripts.

One of beauties of Slackware’s packaging system is that its feature set is so minimal yet so effective. The package files are gzipped tar archives making it easy to view the contents of packages using standard tools available in all Linux distributions. The system package database and package setup scripts are a collection of ASCII text files, allowing simple shell scripts to be created that can query and amend all stored information of an installed package.

I used to build Slackware packages of a number of applications, and one of the things I would have found most useful would have been pre-installation and post-removal scripts (Slackware only supports post install scripts) to remove old config files and perform some final janitorial work.

If you compare and contrast Slackware’s package and package management system against Debian’s and RPM for example, there are a great many features that, *by design*, are noticably absent from Slackware’s; and for me personally I can’t say that I miss them!

I hope to spread some knowledge and meet fellow Slackware users and contributors. I hear that Belgium has some good beer too :-)