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I could not help noticing that the SliTaz community seems to consists of very few (but very active) members - at least the ones involved in development.
My question is: in case a SliTaz user (who does not possess advanced skills) needs a package to be ported to SliTaz, can he count on the community for that? Are user requests accepted?
Hoping that the answer is yes, where can we post our requests, on this forum or on some other webpage?
Thank you
Fenton
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I would say try and see if it gets picked up by one of the developers. My package-fu is more in package conversion and slight updates. The last package receipt I wrote for the official repository got me scolded because of how bad it was...
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remember there is a convert option that works very well with deb package and with other formats as well (tazpkg convert XXX)
I have been using a number of functions that where not existing on slitaz 3.0, just downloading the .deb package and converting them and they worked like a charm. Sometime, I had to struggle because i had to find several dependencies, but all in all it's been very usefull.
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I would be more than willing to aid and assist any user who wants to have something ported to their machine. I started
http://forum.slitaz.org/topic/cmus-default-music-player
because while I love the GUI of the alsa player I feel as if CMUS is enough for my needs and fits perfectly with the goals of Slitaz. Someone was right there in the http://scn.slitaz.org/ community on IRC to help and built the package.
In return I feel as if this is something that needs to be paid forward. I need and want to learn how to build packages *for* Slitaz, and anyone who wants something as I did I would build it for them. I just have to dedicate a block of time to learning. If one of the developers would show me how to do this I would be happy to learn.
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> remember there is a convert option that works very well with deb package
> and with other formats as well (tazpkg convert XXX)
does this mean that we can simply take any deb package and convert it automatically?
Does this process require any expertise, such as for specifying options or something?
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>does this mean that we can simply take any deb package and convert it automatically?
>Does this process require any expertise, such as for specifying options or something?
yes and no.
First it may or may not work (i have been in general successful, i did that for Thunderbird with 3.0)
But second, you may hit difficulties if there are lot of dependencies because you have locate each dep then convert it; and in turn it may have deps too.
I already went through downloading like 10 deps and this is a painfull process.
but if you are lucky just do it.
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^^^^^^
and this can be a major problem with some applications.
Dependency Hell.
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I would also say it depends. For example, if you try converting something like Evolution that is deeply integrated with and into Gnome, you'd have to convert most of Gnome's packages to get it to work.
The rule of thumb I use is that if it takes converting more than 5 dependancies to work, it probably isn't worth it. Watch out for times when you find yourself converting packages already in SliTaz's repository. They will break SliTaz if used. Linux kernel drivers or xorg drivers generally won't work if converted and may break SliTaz - trust me on this.
I find using debian packages best for conversion. You can also search the content of files on their packages site, which makes finding dependencies easier.
Package hacking is probably the next step, which is where you extract the packages to modify them in some way - generally to clean away the junk SliTaz doesn't use (like the doc, man and menu directories) or to combine packages with their dependencies.
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Thanks: you've showed me how to do this
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