Tukaani pkgtools was a fork of Slackware pkgtools around the years 2005–2007. Tukaani pkgtools are no longer developed.

In 2007, Tukaani pkgtools supported recent versions of Tukaani Linux, Slackware, Zenwalk, VectorLinux, and Slamd64 distributions. VectorLinux even shipped with Tukaani pkgtools by default and kept doing so for years. VectorLinux 7.2 released in 2017 might have been the last distribution to use Tukaani pkgtools.

The original reason to fork Slackware pkgtools was to add support for compressors other than gzip, specifically lzma. Nowadays Slackware pkgtools support gzip, bzip2, lzma, and xz, so one doesn’t need Tukaani pkgtools for other compression formats anymore. However, there were lots of other improvements in Tukaani pkgtools (in context of the year 2007):

  • upgradepkg is significantly faster, especially with large packages.

  • installpkg --warn compares the package content to the file system contents, and displays what would actually be overwritten if the package is installed.

  • installpkg and upgradepkg accept FTP and HTTP URLs

  • pkgtool can download and install or upgrade packages (roughly comparable to e.g. slackpkg or slapt-get). This feature can be used either via menus or non-interactively from the command line.

  • makepkg can set all files to root:root 0755/0644 in the package even when not run as root (and without fakeroot). This eases building packages as non-root.

  • viewpkg for viewing package information and file list

  • convertpkg to convert between compression formats

  • explodepkg can extract also .deb and .rpm packages (without rpm2tgz or rpm2cpio)

  • makerepo makes it easy to create your own Slackware compatible package repository.

  • Keeps a log when packages have been installed, upgraded, or removed.

  • Improved parsing of command line options in several tools

  • Various reliability improvements

In the Slackware 10.x era, Tukaani pkgtools had practically perfect compatibility with the original Slackware pkgtools. Achieving this required continuous effort to stay up to date with things happening in Slackware Current.

Since Tukaani pkgtools are no longer maintained, it is not safe to install them on a recent release of any distribution. Quite a bit has changed over the years in Slackware pkgtools, for example, there is now support for uninstall script (douninst.sh), the package database directory has been moved to /var/lib/pkgtools, and modern GNU tar is used instead of requiring the old GNU tar 1.13.

See also the screenshots.

The most curious might want to look at the changelog or the source files in the Git repository:

git clone https://git.tukaani.org/pkgtools.git