[Slackbuilds-users] Slackbuild side-effects?

[Donald Allen]

>From the slackwiki slackbuilds page: "SlackBuild scripts are simple
shell scripts which can automate the compiling and packaging of a
program from source." From this statement and since the output of
running a SlackBuild script is a Slackware package, I assumed that
once a package is built on one machine, it could be installed on other
like machines. That appears not to be the case, at least for gnucash.
I generated a gnucash package on one x86_64 machine and once installed
on that machine, it works properly. However, on another x86_64
machine, after installing the packages on which it depends (in the
order specified), I installed the gnucash package built on the
original machine, and gnucash does not run. I get

ERROR: In procedure open-file:
ERROR: Permission denied: "/usr/share/guile/1.8/slibcat"

The error message is misleading, in that the file is missing, so not a
permission problem.

I then re-ran the gnucash.SlackBuild on this second machine and
installed the resulting package again, and now gnucash works. So it
appears that there is at least one (perhaps more) side-effect of
running the SlackBuild script that is essential to the proper
installation of the program. In other words, just installing the
package isn't sufficient. This seems wrong and perhaps a bug in the
gnucash script, although I may have the wrong impression of the
function of these scripts and their resulting packages (though the
sentence I quote above talks about "compiling and packaging", not
installing, leading one to believe that there's a clean separation --
compiling and packaging is the job of the SlackBuild script,
installation is the job of the resulting package).

/Don