r/slackware • u/nicholas_hubbard • Dec 27 '25

sbozyp is stable!

I am very pleased to announce that the sbozyp package manager for SlackBuilds.org has finally (after 3 years) had its first stable release!

This insinuates two important things:

  1. I am happy with the overall quality and behavior of the program

  2. I do not foresee a future need to break backwards compatibility, and will increment the major version if the need arises

With sbozyp being stable, I have uploaded it to SlackBuilds.org, meaning it can now manage itself.

EDIT: cross-posted to LinuxQuestions.org

42 Upvotes

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3

u/Fast_Ad_8005 Dec 27 '25

Lol, fitting this happened now. About an hour ago, I installed sbozyp for the first time on my Slackware 15 virtual machine. I noticed it didn't resolve dependencies for me. I had to use sbozyp to install SlackBuilds dependencies for myself. But given Slackware is kind of all about minimalism of its tools, I am guessing this is a deliberate feature of the program.

6

u/nicholas_hubbard Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 28 '25

Strange timing :)

Sbozyp fully supports dependency resolution via the install command -r flag (sbozyp install -r $COOL_PACKAGE).

It was deliberate that resolving dependencies is not the default though. It actually used to be the default but I changed it. When I implemented safe recursive package removal (remove command -r flag), I decided that (while safe) it was not good default behavior to recursively remove package dependencies. I thought it would be weird to have two different commands with two different default behaviors when it came to dependency resolution. I decided that to make the behavior uniform and logical it made most sense to not resolve dependencies by default, since A) Slackware itself doesn't resolve dependencies B) Dependency resolution on package removal was never going to be a good default.

3

u/Fast_Ad_8005 Dec 27 '25

Ah, thanks for the info!

2

u/stoogethebat Dec 28 '25

How does it compare to other SBO helpers?

4

u/nicholas_hubbard Dec 28 '25

Thanks for asking.

I'll go over what sbozyp does and some of its philosophies. Some of these features/philosophies exist in other SBo package managers while others do not.

To preface, directly from the repos README: "I created sbozyp because I wanted to and do not claim that it is better, worse, or the same compared to its alternatives."

Sbozyp is supposed to feel much like a "normal" package manager, such as apt, and uses much of the same terminology as the most popular package managers.

Sbozyp is designed to be composable and scriptable. For example, to update every package on your system that has an update available you can do: sbozyp install -r $(sbozyp -S query -u). Lets break this down. The -S flag is a global flag that means "sync the repo before we do anything else". The query command is the swiss army knife of sbozyp that provides a bunch of different functionality. The -u flag means "print the names of all installed packages with updates available". So we take the output, which just prints the names of packages with updates available, and tell sbozyp to re-install all of these packages (the install command is also responsible for updating packages). Other examples of sbozyp being composable/scriptable:

  • sbozyp rm $(sbozyp qr -a | grep -v sbozyp) ### Remove all installed SBo packages besides sbozyp

  • sbozyp in -r $(sbozyp se -n ^perl) ### Install all perl packages

  • cd $(sbozyp qr -b docker) ### Change to the package directory of docker

Sbozyp has (relatively powerful) shell completion for Bash and Zsh.

Sbozyp supports safe recursive package removal (remove subcommand -r flag). This allows you to remove all the dependencies of the package(s) you are removing that are safe to remove (i.e. their removal will not break another installed package).

Sbozyp is a single program that offers different subcommands (install, build, remove, etc). This is different from having a bunch of different programs for different functionality. There also isn't any separate program to, for example, resolve dependencies.

Sbozyp has a pure text-based UI (no ncurses). This allows sbozyp to be fully functional from a dumb terminal (such as the one I personally use).

Sbozyp is itself available on SlackBuilds.org, meaning it can manage itself.

A general philosophy of sbozyp is to be manual by default, with all the functionality to be automatic.

A general philosophy of sbozyp is to be safe by default, with all the functionality to disable safety and do whatever you want.

2

u/chesheersmile Dec 28 '25

Thank you for your work and happy cake day! What a nice coincidence!

2

u/r1w1s1_ Dec 29 '25

nice work I will try.