skalibs is a package centralizing the free software / open source C
development files used for building all software at skarnet.org: it
contains essentially general-purpose libraries. You will need to
install skalibs if you plan to build skarnet.org software. The point
is that you won't have to download and compile big libraries, and care
about portability issues, everytime you need to build a package: do it
only once.

skalibs can also be used as a sound basic start for C development.
There are a lot of general-purpose libraries out there; but if your
main goal is to produce small and secure C code with a focus on system
programming, skalibs might be for you.

NOTE:
Upstream recommends building skarnet.org softwares with static libraries
as most of skarnet.org softwares are small enough that using shared
libraries are generally not worth using. Therefore, the SlackBuild
script will only build the static libraries by default.

If you want to also build the shared libraries, pass BUILD_SHARED=yes
environment variable to the script like below:

    BUILD_SHARED=yes ./skalibs.SlackBuild

Similarly, to avoid building the static libraries, you can pass
BUILD_STATIC=no to the script. For example, to only build the shared
libraries and not the static ones, you can do something like

    BUILD_SHARED=yes BUILD_STATIC=no ./skalibs.SlackBuild

If you just want to build and use skarnet.org softwares, building only
the static libraries should be sufficient.