Making sbopkg and sbotools coexist

I have been using that great tool sbopkg for several years and it has always worked perfectly. Combined with the collection of queue files, the dependency resolution becomes semi-automatic.

A new project, called sbotools, emerged recently which seems fairly interesting. Unlike sbopkg, the set of tools it provides does not have the same look and feel as, say, pkgtool. Instead, it is more like a ports system interface for Slackware, using SBo. With the recent addition of the REQUIRES="" line in the .info files at SBo, automatic dependency resolution can be easily handled by such third-party projects.

I like to have both sbopkg and sbotools installed, as in my opinion they can complement each other nicely. Their default settings, however, get the SBo scripts collection downloaded to different places. It is not such a big deal, but I do not like redundancy.

The location of the SBo scripts repository is set in the following line of /etc/sbopkg/sbopkg.conf for sbopkg:

# Path variables
LOGFILE=${LOGFILE:-/var/log/sbopkg/sbopkg-build-log}
QUEUEDIR=${QUEUEDIR:-/var/lib/sbopkg/queues}
REPO_ROOT=${REPO_ROOT:-/var/lib/sbopkg}
SRCDIR=${SRCDIR:-/var/cache/sbopkg}

This location contains on my system three subfolders:

sbopkg/
├── SBo
│   └── 14.0
├── local
└── queues

The sub-subfolder 14.0 contains the SlackBuilds for Slackware 14.0. Any local SlackBuilds are placed in local. The queue files collection is in the queues folder.

In the case of sbotools, the configuration file is /etc/sbotools/sbotools.conf and it contains by default:

SBO_HOME=/usr/sbo

So, it’s rather simple: change SBO_HOME to point to /var/lib/sbopkg/SBo/14.0 (or whatever the version is):

SBO_HOME=/var/lib/sbopkg/SBo/14.0

PS: I do not know how safe this is, but so far I have not had issues.

UPDATE (16 Jul 2016): this approach no longer works with sbotools version 2.0. Here’s the situation. When installed (on Slackware 14.2), specifying SBO_HOME to point to /var/lib/sbopkg/SBo/14.2 will create a subfolder called repo, where the SlackBuilds categories will be contained. Therefore, sbopkg will not be able to find them there. If I find a solution, I will further update this post.