... which is the perfect answer to the Thread of Derp ("I have been trying various distros in case Slackware should cease. I remember when PV was ill and my order was messed up. So am wondering what guarantees there are for Slackware's future? Is it a corperation? LLC? Who's in charge other than PV?")

Caldera was a "corperation", but look what happened when Darl and Ralphie got their hands on it. The first casualty was OpenLinux 2.3, which was quietly pulled and killed. And the "corperation" went on to screw both customers and shareholders, despite "guarantees". And "guarantees" will get you exactly nothing when the "corperation" is in liquidation.

Back to the original topic, I'm working with Ubuntu Server at the moment and it's shocking how difficult it is to find out totally basic trivial stuff like "what packages are installed, what versions are they and when were they upgraded" and "what repositories are enabled for automatic upgrades, can we add some more, and are they alive".

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Well, if you're from the land of RPMs then you are used to running screwball commands to find out the first part versus "ls -lart /var/log/packages".

Many distros have problems tracking packages. I really don't know why nobody I know ever grew as fond as I did of the original KPackage in KDE 3.5. It had Slackware compatibility for installing and removing but that was like frosting on the cake. The "cake" was that it lists packages in alphabetical order on the left side of a vertically split box (complete with version and date modified) and one tab on the right side listed exact directory location of all files installed as part of that package.

It even showed errors for broken links and/or otherwise orphaned files plus if you found you had more than one version installed by looking at files one could see any overlap and if none showed, easily uninstall the old version right from within KPackage since it linked pkgtools.. It was a great one-stop-shop..... so much so that I downloaded the old KPackage (version 4's was basically castrated and useless) and all it's dependencies and built a directory in /opt/kde to support KPackage v3 and renamed the executable to KPackage3 to avoid conflicts and I still use it to this day.

The only concern I have now is that "upgrading" to v5 KDE could present unforeseen problems. I certainly hope not because I use KPackage 3 regularly and would deeply mourn it's loss. Again I really don't understand why it didn't create an outcry when KDE gutted and dropped it. I guess it being so utilitarian just never got the praise it deserved being less sexy than the big apps.

Yech....Yeah SCO, IBM, and wild hilarity ensued. I'm happy all of that crap resolved itself. It's good to be a Slacker.