Article about upgrading to current

brianL · 05-18-2009, 09:06 AM

Any opinions on this article from Distrowatch?
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...090518#feature

linus72 · 05-18-2009, 09:11 AM

Is it true??
If so I will try it.

brianL · 05-18-2009, 09:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by linus72

Is it true??

No idea. I'm waiting for the real Slackware experts to comment on whether it's a good or bad procedure.

allend · 05-18-2009, 09:41 AM

There some factual errors in the article.
Slackpkg is NOT a dependency tracker.
Slackpkg CAN install new packages via 'slackpkg install-new'.

I have not used 'slackroll' although I have been aware of it for some time. I believe it to be a useful and reliable.

At this time 'slackpkg' services my needs and it is an officially supported tool, so it remains my tool of choice.

neymac · 05-18-2009, 09:53 AM

I saw the slackroll tutorial at hxxp://wiki.github.com/rg3/slackroll/tutorial that explain how it works.
I use slackware 12.2 and I am not confident on slackroll to upgrade it to current.
I prefer Patrick's way to do it.

brianL · 05-18-2009, 10:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by allend

There some factual errors in the article.
Slackpkg is NOT a dependency tracker.
Slackpkg CAN install new packages via 'slackpkg install-new'.

Yeah, I noticed those errors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by allend

I have not used 'slackroll' although I have been aware of it for some time. I believe it to be a useful and reliable.

I'll have to read up about it. I'm a bit wary of shortcuts like that mentioned in the article. If I wanted to upgrade, I think I would stick to the "official" method.

Quote:

Originally Posted by allend

At this time 'slackpkg' services my needs and it is an officially supported tool, so it remains my tool of choice.

Mine too.

gegechris99 · 05-18-2009, 10:36 AM

Hello

Robby Workman commented on the Distrowatch "Reader Comments" section:

Quote:

18 • slackpkg works fine (by Robby Workman on 2009-05-18 14:07:03 GMT from United States)
No need to recommend an external utility when slackpkg works for this just fine.
slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg clean-system
All of that is mentioned in the slackpkg documentation.
19 • However... (by Robby Workman on 2009-05-18 14:08:47 GMT from United States)
THANKS for the Slackware mention, ladislav -- it's much appreciated. Publicity is a good thing, so apologies for the first comment with only criticism.

brianL · 05-18-2009, 10:42 AM

Ah, I missed that.

dive · 05-18-2009, 11:00 AM

Was just going to submit a comment about slackpkg - looks like I was beaten to it :-)

disturbed1 · 05-18-2009, 05:07 PM

This forum will be flooded in a few days with "I upgraded to current and now -----"

The article should have mentioned the order in which to upgrade - at least maybe a warning to read UPGRADE.TXT.

Quote:

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 once or twice a week to ensure that you are always in sync with the "current" development **.

Just as dumb as blindly running pacman -Syu twice a week. When (not if

) something major gets updated, you'll be SOL.

When you run slackpkg upgrade-all you get a dialog that allows you to select which potential upgrades to install. Sometimes you can do all, sometimes it just won't work out. Also with slackpkg, it has the option to present diffs of .new files so you can decide how to merge the configs together.

I run a pure -current system, and a ba$tard that's been rolling since 12.0-current. My 12.2 install had a few -current packages until a month or so ago. It gets to a point where you can not mix releases without some serious human intervention. A blind upgrade-all from 12.2 to -current will cause some breakage.

I would have rather seen the article include an rsync script, or even ftp, recite some text from isolinux/README.TXT. So people can start from a clean -current install.

Nille_kungen · 05-19-2009, 10:49 AM

Users who run current should read the changelog before an update to keep known problems in mind.
I think tools like this only leeds to greater damages and confusedness since the users take shortcuts and doesn't know about the things in changelog.
I will continue to use slackpkg, but i like the publicity that an article gives so thumbs up for that.

Bourdieu · 05-19-2009, 01:45 PM

I keep up to date with current thanks to slackroll on my laptop since slackware 12.0 release.

Previously I was using slackpg. I found it to do its job nicely. Especially I like the way it sticks to the slackware spirit and respect the official procedures.

When I first read about slackroll, I was seduced by this same concern to not be intrusive. In this regard, it can be thought as a relative of slackpkg.

The main advantages it has over slackpg is that it's a lot faster and it has some quite useful features slackpkg don't.

Quote:

Users who run current should read the changelog before an update to keep known problems in mind.
I think tools like this only leeds to greater damages and confusedness since the users take shortcuts and doesn't know about the things in changelog.

slackroll is not that kind of tool. It has 5 commands related to changelog :

Code:

changelog               Displays the last downloaded ChangeLog.txt batch
download-changelog      Download the full ChangeLog.txt
list-changelog          List all known changelog entries and their identifiers
changelog-entries ID... Display changelog entries by identifier
full-changelog          Display every known changelog entry

I always read the changelog before upgrading.

Moreover each time an update detects activity in the changelog slackroll advises you to run the slackroll changelog command in order to read the changes made.

Quote:

Also with slackpkg, it has the option to present diffs of .new files so you can decide how to merge the configs together.

Slackroll also has this feature.

It also has commands to deal with particular situations that require specific attention. You can learn more about it and about the differences compared to other similar tool on the FAQ of the website http://wiki.github.com/rg3/slackroll/faq

Since I started using it 2 years ago, i found it to be reliable. I have already exchanged with the official maintainer and it replied quickly and even integrated some of my remarks in the following release. You can safely try it but be aware that it is intended only for users that run current.

PS: Just to be clear, i have nothing to do with the project.

rworkman · 05-19-2009, 05:11 PM

I don't want my remarks to be interpreted as "negative" toward slackroll either - I haven't actually used it, so even if I had said something negative, it should be ignored since I have no experience with it. That being said, knowing that rg3 wrote it, I suspect that it can't be *all* bad :-) I was just pointing out for DistroWatch that there was an option that shipped with Slackware, and it's officially supported for whatever that's worth to users.

niels.horn · 05-19-2009, 05:38 PM

I have used slackroll in the past and it did it's job just fine.
Somehow I prefer slackpkg though... It's officially part of Slackware and I have it set up on both -current and all 12.x boxes I maintain.

rg3 · 05-19-2009, 05:44 PM

As the author of slackroll, I think I'm forced to comment on the article. I didn't write it myself and wasn't aware it existed until now that I have opened this thread. I can only say that I'm very disappointed. The procedure described in the article will _not_ work, plain and simple. Upgrading to -current was never supposed to be performed that way, not with slackroll either. Furthermore, due to the recent changes to the package managing tools and the change in the package format, the procedure will simply, I repeat, _not_ work. I know because I had to answer some questions today about someone who tried to follow the steps in the article.

This is worse for me. slackroll would benefit from having more users (it's currently a very niche application). But with this kind of publicity, my tool is going to be associated with breaking people's system. If you want to use slackroll, start by reading its tutorial slowly and completely. It's the only way to go. Hell, if people do what the article says, they are going to get aaa_elflibs upgraded, which is not supposed to be done.

Hint for anybody really wanting to try slackroll, seriously: read the tutorial, perform every step it mentions before upgrading anything and setting the mirror to one of -current, and then, only then, change the mirror to -current and be very careful, as you will have to upgrade pkgtools first, install xz and do some other stuff which is not still covered in the -current documentation, as far as I know. It's not trivial.

Edit: some further comments.

The article author was on crack!

Quote:

For a more automated way of keeping up with Slackware's development, we are going to use a third-party tool called slackroll. This tool was specifically designed for those who prefer to run Slackware "current" and want to keep it up-to-date with minimum of fuss.

Wrong! It works for both -current and -stable, and the minimum of fuss is not translated to "slackroll update" and "slackroll upgrade". Way to break your system!

Quote:

Slackroll works by parsing the Slackware ChangeLog

What the fuck? No! It parses FILELIST.TXT. The part about parsing the changelog is only about helping the user. It's not internally used for taking any decisions!

Quote:

Personally, I have never had any trouble using slackroll

Lucky bastard!

Quote:

, but as always, this is an unsupported utility, so if something breaks, you are on your own.

Wrong! Contact me for advice, trouble, etc. You know, I'm willing to help Slackware users like I try to do in this forum, on IRC, over email...

Quote:

... the actual steps ...

WTF? No preparing the package states, no running "slackware changelog", no running "slackroll list-transient". I-D-I-O-T-I-C.

I'm going to bed.