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I know that apt-get is meant to be a packaging manager for Debian. But I'd like to learn if this software can be also ported to different operating systems, especially to Slackware.

I am the author of Slax, a Slackware-based operating system, so I know lots of the internals of a working OS, library dependencies, and so on. From my point of view, installing a debian package to Slackware or other distribution is fairly possible if both the distros share similar libraries, which most Linuxes do nowadays. Slackware, despite it's focus on stability, is usually using recent libraries as like Debian.

As far as I understand apt, it's just an application which tracks dependencies and has a list of mirrors from which to download packages. Unpacking the deb packages is a matter of

ar -x

Most init scripts will be the same if the Sys-V init style is supported. Some of the Debian packages may not work out of the box, especially those which are deeply system-related, like udev for example, but majority of the APPLICATIONS should install and work OK on Slackware in my opinion. I tried Google's official Chrome Browser package for Debian and it works just fine on Slackware.

Are there any drawbacks in porting apt-get to Slackware or other Linux? Did anybody attempt to port it already? Thank you

Tomas M
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1 Answers1

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The package slapt-get is the Slackware implementations of apt-get.

slapt-get install whatever-package

Any way you should be able to compile it on any OS. Of course you might have to do some small changes to the source if the repos structure and files to download are very different.

wti
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    slapt-get won't install Debian packages in Slackware. It only serves for the purpose of installing official Slackware packages, this won't help me. I wish to use the huge Debian repository of packages, not just the official Slackware ones. – Tomas M Feb 05 '15 at 18:28
  • Sorry I did not understand. Since both distros got apart things should have changed a lot internally. So you have high or very high chances that your packages dependencies installations are going to break other things. Is the same with Ubuntu and debian. You could compile apt and use it, but as a matter of fact is not advisable to do it. Maybe you could also try to configure slapt-get to go to a Debian. I have done something like that with Ubuntu, and I have managed to break a few systems like that in the past, but in this last one I am just speculating. Any way is not advisable. – wti Feb 05 '15 at 18:40