Those of you who are Opera fans may already be aware but the Opera Desktop Team regularly puts out "snapshot" (development) releases of Opera from time to time on
our blog, which we refer to as "Opera Next". On average we probably have one a week though we have occasionally had as many as three a day.
One nice thing about our Opera Next packages is that they are configured to install alongside Opera stable and use their own set of preferences, allowing you to test an unstable build with little risk to your stable perferences.
Whilst no native Slackware packages are provided, we do provide generic cross-distro tar archives that include an install script (and setup an uninstall script after installation). These packages do work well on recent Slackware releases.
Despite the fact that these non-native packages exist I know that many Slackers would prefer have native packages. Indeed it is for this very reason that you can find
opera.Slackbuild on SBo. I would have loved to contribute an opera-next.Slackbuild but the rate of updates relative to the frequency with which SBo itself updates would make this a largely futile exercise. Tweaking opera.Slackbuild to repack development builds is not as straightforward as one might hope because the "Next" packages use different naming conventions. So for some time I have been providing my own repacked binaries in a
mini-repository.
I now have a better solution! You can now also find an up to date opera-next.SlackBuild on the Opera's snapshot download server itself. Simply click on the Linux/FreeBSD download link from the
Opera Desktop Team Blog and when the directory of packages loads, adjust the URL by adding .unsupported on the end.
For example for build 12.00-1417 from Wednesday, May 16, 2012:
snapshot.opera.com/unix/family_12.00-1417/.unsupported/
What is the advantage of having these on the snapshot server directly? Well, they are updated by the script that actually uploads the official builds (possible because I maintain that script!
) to use the latest version information. So an up to date opera-next.SlackBuild is now always available without delay, as soon as the official builds are made public.
This is probably the best I can do to support Opera Next using Slackers right now, short of getting official Slackware packages produced (which involves more work internally than just putting a opera-next.SlackBuild on the build servers).
I have based the opera-next.SlackBuild off the opera.SlackBuilds found on SBo and slacky.eu but adjusted them to use Next builds, made them entirely self contained (no separate doinst.sh and slack-desc files) and added a touch of automation. They will download the 'source' package if it is not present locally. Also they will take a couple of optional command line switches:
Code:
-a, --auto Tries to work out the latest publicly
available build and repacks it
-c, --clean Cleans the working directory of files
created during packaging
(To clarify '-a' or '--auto' will attempt to work out the latest public Opera Next build and repack it, without even having to update $VERSION).
P.S. The .unofficial directories also contains a an ArchLinux opera-next PKGBUILD. It is the same as the one I maintain on the
AUR, but again with the advantage that it is always instantly updated as soon as a new snapshot is released.
