Spack For Linux

Spack is an open source command-line software that provides a simple, yet complete package generator especially designed for the popular and powerful Slackware Linux operating system, as well as for any other Slackware derivative.

In other words, Spack is a standalone package manager that features its own CPIO-based package format, while still being fully compatible with the default package management system of Slackware Linux.

The project has been originally designed for lazy Slackware users who hate writing SlackBuilds, helping them to easily and quickly generate packages for their distribution, as well as to effortlessly install these packages.

In order to make decent packages for Slackware Linux, Spack aims to drastically shrink the code you are required to write, and it manages all of the redundant tasks that are relative to the Slackware packaging policy.

Installing Spack in your Slackware distribution is quite easy, as you’ll have to download the latest version from its official website (see link at the end of the article) or via Softpedia using the dedicated download button above.

Save the archive somewhere on your computer, preferably your Home directory, unpack it with any archive manager utility, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/spack-3.12).

Then, run the ‘./configure’ command to configure the program for your Slackware distribution, followed by the ‘make’ command to install it, as no compilation is required. The program comes with various command-line options that can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘spack --help’ command in a terminal emulator.

At the moment, it has been successfully tested with the latest stable version of the Slackware Linux distribution. It is fully compatible with both 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures.