swaret server down for awhile, what's going on?

hi people,

anyone knows what is going on with swaret? they have been offline for awhile now.

karma?

Maybe the punk ass swaret author decided to finally give up and install slapt-get

hehe come on it's not that bad

I guess you have never read about the dirtyhanded tricks that the author of Swaret did towards slapt-get. You can read the full thing at slapt-get's spot on freshmeat.net, but let me post you the one article by one of the freshmeat.net admins that just about sums it all up. By the way, I think swaret is an OK program, but I do believe that slapt-get is much better regardless of the fact that the author of slapt-get doesn't act like a jealous kiddie.

[»] Re: memory leak and system fail after upgrade by jeff covey - Nov 25th 2003 12:35:07 > First of all, slapt-get caused me lots > of Memory problems and leaks, even my > kernel hung for a moment after upgrading > glibc. I will NEVER use it anymore, rip > off someone else. Lest anyone should take this nonsense seriously, please be aware that it was written by Luc Cottyn (xbone), the author of swaret. He has been a pain in the Internet's neck for at least the past year. Last May, we received a report that he'd been spamming various IRC channels on freenode with advertisements for swaret. We asked him to explain this, and he blamed it on overzealous friends. He said he'd asked them to stop, and that was that. Until October, anyway. Then he posted a comment on forum.swaret.org suggesting that people start spreading a rumor that slapt-get contains a trojan. He posted three such comments on linuxpackages.net in his inimitable l33t l4m3r style, and one on freshmeat (and probably at other places we don't know about). He again blamed it on his users, and I asked him to please try to get them under control. He managed to contain himself (at least on freshmeat) until last week, when he posted the above junk on slapt-get's page and this on swaret's: > I am VERY VERY happy for using this > tool. Very happy, because i stopped > using another management tool for > slackware (broke my box, will not name > it, go to hell). About swaret, the > dependency support is really NEAT. My > gnome packages were broken every time, > and since i use swaret for about > 5 minutes, i have no broken libraries > anymore, because swaret fixed them!! > -God Bless Swaret- Congratulations also > to be part of the official slackware > distribution! We decided that we'd had enough, and we removed swaret from freshmeat. I wrote and told him that even if he wasn't involved in all of this, that we couldn't waste our time dealing with his childish users every few weeks. He flew into a self-righteous flurry of emailing activity, writing us a dozen times a day to proclaim his innocence and demand justice, reaching a crescendo in which he told me: "You are like Bush, you are an American who likes war and hurt innocent people." This went on until scoop sent him a copy of a section of freshmeat's logs which showed that the comments had been posted from the same IP address from which he updated swaret's listing a few minutes later. He became mysteriously silent after that, and we never heard from him again. I have no doubt that swaret is good and useful software, but if you use it, please be aware of the kind of people you're involving yourself with.

Wow, that blows me away. Guess I'll have a look at slapt-get. I've been successfully using swaret for quite a while, but ...

SiegeX, can you put some links for more infos ?

While the above is true, it is also a little out of date. XBone left/was removed from the swaret development team. It is now run by LinuxSneaker :

http://freshmeat.net/projects/slaptget/

Read the most recent post. Note: I do not use swaret and only toy with slaptget so really have little feeling either way about the projects or the developers.

EDIT: If I were to guess I would say swaret.org was registered by xbone, who did not renew it. Since the domain never got transfered to LinuxSneaker he did not know it expired. This is pure speculation, but the timing is about right.

They never took Swaret off of Freshmeat.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/swaret/

Originally posted by WMD They never took Swaret off of Freshmeat. http://freshmeat.net/projects/swaret/

Actually it was removed in November 2003 and allowed to be added again earlier this year (February/March time frame).

Mephisto, thanks for the update I was not aware that xbone is no longer on the team. This still doesnt change my view that slapt-get is a better way to go, but now I hope swaret the best of luck.

In case any of you care, reason I dont like swaret is because the way it resolves dependancy issues is by using ldd and seing if all the needed libraries are found. This is a half-assed way of doing it, and by no fault of swaret, its just that slackware packages arnt built with dependancy information in mind, unlike an .rpm or a .deb.

Slapt-get doesn't try to resolve dependancies (although the author does have a script in his FAQ which basically does the same thing as swaret). And to tell you the truth, ive never come across an issue yet. The way im currently using slapt-get is by editing the slaptgetrc file and telling it to use a slackware-current mirror which i got from the slackware.com/getslack page. Then I found a really nice script (which is also now included in the slapt-get faq) which runs 'slapt-get --update' every night which tells slapt-get to look and see what packages it finds on the current tree that my box doesnt have, if it finds anything it will email me with the list of packages as well as their coresponding changelog. Then once I get the email i simply run 'slapt-get --dist-upgrade' and now my box is up to par. Great thing about it is, ill never have to do a clean install again like you would for Mandrake or Redhat/Fedora when a new version comes out. When slackware 11 comes out, ill already have it essentially.

i just got rid of swaret and installed slapt-get, basically not much different for me only that it actually works as swaret servers are offline now

I just tried slackpkg and Im switching to it, although it doesn't have dependencies check, it has a really nice search engine that allows searching for programs and libraries that are inside a package, so if you need a library but you have no idea which package is it in, you can search it with slackpkg.

and another positive feature about slackpkg is that its supported by the slackware project, it comes in the /extra folder.

right now im doing a system upgrade from 10 to current using slackpkg

i tried slapt-get too, but it didn't work right for me....

If they are 'down' it's probably because they tried to 'upgrade' their server using their own software. We linux people(some) are NUTS to upgrade, when probably the only two upgrades anybody has NEEDED in long time were to PHP(the one Pat V. saw fit to compile special and upgrade the 8.1 tree with recently) and the fix in kernel 2.4.23.
I'll always take my chances upgrading my system manually. try searching this forum for:
swaret broken, or dropline broken(same topic, different title)

Hello guys,

I have seen comments on swaret's "half-assed" way of resolving dependencies before, and I have to ask: what's so half-assed with it? I mean, if I encounter a program which have dependency issues, I would definitely use ldd to try and find the missing libraries. I have never heard of any other way to do it, so why is it "bad" when swaret does it? I guess dependency issues are not very probable if one keeps to the "official" Slack package tree, but if one goes outside it, resolving dependencies this way seems very reasonable.

This is a sincere question, and definitely not intended as flame-bait.

My own opinion on the swaret issue - or rather, mess - is that I really like swaret (without its' dependency resolver I would probably not have gotten rid of Dropline as easily as I did - three times!), but then I haven't tried any of the other package tools; slapt-get, slackpkg or slackupdate. I think it's a pity that the behaviour of one of the developers destroys the reputation of a very nice program.

Cheers