Using slackbuilds.org to create Slackware packages

Sorry for the long posting hiatus but don't expect it to end. I just don't have a lot of time or material to devote to the blog right now.

I recently wanted to upgrade Postfix on my Slackware mail server. I used to use packages from LinuxPackages.net for unofficial packages, but the site has gotten less active and always had a reputation for varying package quality. My preference is using the SlackBuilds to build my own packages. It's fairly simple to download their build script, edit as needed, then build a Slackware package from source.

Since Postfix is not available from Slackware official repositories, I downloaded the SlackBuild files and then the Postfix source.

$ wget http://postfix.cs.utah.edu/source/official/postfix-2.6.8.tar.gz 
$ wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/13.1/network/postfix.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf postfix.tar.gz
$ ls postfix/
README     postfix-2.6.8.tar.gz  postfix.info  slack-desc
doinst.sh  postfix.SlackBuild*   rc.postfix

I am using Cyrus-SASL, so it was important for me to note the following from the SlackBuild Postfix page.

This script builds postfix with support for Dovecot SASL but does not
include any support for Cyrus-SASL. If you need to enable support for
Cyrus see SASL_README in the source code.

I also noted the following from the postfix.SlackBuild file itself.

# Postfix unfortunately does not use a handy ./configure script so you
# must generate the makefiles using (what else?) "make makefiles". The
# following includes support for TLS and SASL. It should automatically
# find PCRE and DB3 support. The docs have information for adding
# additional support such as MySQL or LDAP.

I changed the "make makefile" lines from:

make makefiles \
  CCARGS='-DUSE_SASL_AUTH -DDEF_SERVER_SASL_TYPE=\"dovecot\" -DUSE_TLS' \
  AUXLIBS="-lssl -lcrypto"

to:

make makefiles CCARGS="-DUSE_SASL_AUTH -DUSE_CYRUS_SASL -DHAS_PCRE \
                 -I/usr/local/include/sasl -I/usr/include" \
                 AUXLIBS="-L/usr/local/lib -lsasl2 -L/usr/lib -lpcre"

This added Cyrus-SASL support and also fixed a problem I was having with it finding PCRE. I also changed the VERSION variable to 2.6.8 since the postfix.SlackBuild file was for 2.6.1. After the changes, all I have to do is run the postfix.SlackBuild file then use "upgradepkg" on the resulting postfix-2.6.8-iX86-1_SBo.tgz package. (Note that official packages use xz for compression now, not gzip, so they will have the extension txz).

The next package I will create using SlackBuilds is cyrus-imapd since it also is not included in Slackware. Cyrus-SASL actually has an official package, but I I've been running Cyrus for so long that I have always installed it from source. I don't remember if that is because it wasn't available as a package back in the day or just because I was using some non-standard options.

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