Slackbuilds in Salix Repositories

Salix integrates dependency management for packages in its own repositories and those built from slackbuilds.org, whose package list is mirrored by Salix, using slapt-src.

Where a package is available from both sources, the Salix package is always preferred, even if it is a less recent version. Should you wish to replace it with a build from source, you will need to do so manually from the slackbuilds.org website, and exclude the package in /etc/slapt-getrc to prevent it being automatically downgraded when you do a general package upgrade.

However, that means if Salix in future offers an even newer version of the package in question, you will need to remove the exclude in order to get it.

An alternative would be to change the source line in /etc/slapt-srcrc, but this is not recommended as it means slapt-src/Sourcery would ignore the presence of a package in the Salix repositories by default, but the user would still need to add an exclude to /etc/slapt-getrc, so would need to know. If there is a reason to prefer building from source in a specific case, the user has full control over that option.

Furthermore, switching to the sbo repository would mean losing the benefit of Salix’s dependency management for slackbuilds.