[Slackbuilds-users] unmentioned SlackBuild system overwrites of Slackware

[B. Watson]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2025, David Chmelik wrote:

> maybe other utilities.  I needed an advanced mount command: typed 'man 
> mount'.  Manpage had been replaced by a Plan 9 manpage.  If someone 
> wants Slackware Plan 9, fine, but, please warn and document in README. 

It hasn't been replaced. The plan 9 man pages are in /opt/plan9/man.
The /etc/profile.d/plan9port.sh script alters MANPATH to put the plan9
man directory first, which is why you're seeing the plan9 mount man
page. You could have looked inside the /var/log/packages/plan9port-*
file to see where its man pages get installed, or used "man -w" to
see the full path to the mount man page (which would have included
/opt/plan9port/man).

However, the fix is simple: without removing the plan9port package,
you can say "chmod -x /etc/profile.d/plan9port.*", then log out
and back in. Profile scripts, PATH, and MANPATH are basic UNIX
knowledge. You really should have been able to solve this on your own,
IMO.

I agree that this is kind of a messed up thing to do without
mentioning it in the README. Have you contacted the plan9port
SlackBuild maintainer about this? That's a better idea than posting
to the mailing list. Look in the plan9port.info file to find the
maintainer's name and email address.

You shouldn't really be complaining to the mailing list about problems
with specific builds unless you've already tried to contact the
build's maintainer and failed to get a response after a week or so.

> It may be broken: removepkg said 'xargs: unmatched double quote; by 
> default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option'. 

Congratulations, you've discovered a pkgtools bug (Slackware's
makepkg, removepkg, etc).

That same message occurs during the build, when running
plan9port.SlackBuild. It's caused by these 2 files in the package:

opt/plan9/bin/"
opt/plan9/bin/""

Those are regular executables, with weird names. Slackware's pkgtools
doesn't handle double-quotes in filenames correctly, possibly because
no other package ever created *has* files named like that, so nobody
thought to check for it.

However, this is also something you should take up with the
maintainer. And possibly with Pat V, since pkgtools is his creation.
How to reach PV is left as an exercise for the reader.

It doesn't look like the xargs error actually hurts anything in the
case of plan9port...

> If people want to change defaults, they'll read about it and do it. 
> Don't just do that automatically like one expects on WIndows, Apple, 
> Ubuntu, Android.

We generally don't change defaults. If installing a package breaks
something or changes something unrelated to the package, you should
definitely contact the package's maintainer, explain the issue in
detail.

*Don't* tell the mailing list "I installed some font package 10+
years ago and it made my X fonts unreadable, but I can't remember
which package" and expect us to be able to look into our crystal balls
and magically be able to tell what the problem was. At the least you
could check and see if that problem *was fixed* sometime in the last
10 years...