The packages contained within the monolithic linuxdoc-tools package are only included because:
a. Of legacy reasons - linuxdoc-tools replaced the monolithic sgml-tools package.
b. They are dependencies of the others, and need to be built in a particular order. The only exception was docbook2xx which was added hastily to make another package build (and because it's similar to docbook2man so it fitted in there).

There is a newer package of LDT already which has been in the queue for a few months. I'll have a look at seeing if it needs a refresh in a few weeks.

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Well, adding doclifter to LDT was just a suggestion. Any way it's shipped, I'll be happy and of course the packaging choices are up to the Slackware team.

Bash 4.3.39 is out!

I assume that patches will be checked a few days before the release of Slackware-next anyway.

If at all possible I would also like to see zfs included.
That file system is _the_ shit

ZFS will probably never be officially included until the license issues between CDDL and GPL are ever resolved. While a legal group did clear Debian on it, ZFS requires a lot of special attention to work correctly.

1. Building ZFS into the kernel is rather problematic. The module, which works better, requires an initramfs to work correctly. In fact, every OS that uses it by default, uses a module version. The built-in, is rather problematic still. Even with Huge kernel, it would be a problem.

2. If ZFS gets updated and the zpool version is updated, recovery can be problematic because zpools aren't backwards compatible. You'd have to lock-step releases with the zpool versions.

3. Most bootloaders still have limited support of ZFS as Root, even Grub's latest git pull is somewhat sketchy. I don't know if LILO and syslinux have support, but they might on some level. Most of the versions of Grub used by BSDs and Solaris/Illumos are heavily patched to near custom versions.

So, basically ZFS would solve a bunch of problems, but equally bring in a new batch as well.

I've been using it for fun on my slack machines, so far without any sort of problems, it just works (TM)
(I don't boot on zfs though). I must say it's a sweet technological piece, It replaces mdadm, lvm and
a lot of other complex stuff. VERY easy to use, has bit-rot protection, is very flexible and well documented
compared to many other solutions. I'd say it's a must-have for the world's leading Linux distribution
I haven't read up on the CDDL vs GPL issues much. RMS said CDDL is free software (that counts for a _lot_ !)
but incompatible with GPL, then again, is there any license out there that is ?

CDDL allows for break offs to keep their changes without resubmitting them back and make them proprietary and closed source. GPL does not.

However, OpenZFS which sponsors ZFS-On-Linux, is ran under near GPL/BSD bylaws within the development model. The Solaris Porting Layer was successful licensed as GPL though, and could be included, but ZFS can't because of Oracle and Oracle's SolarisZFS implementation which is different yet similar to OpenZFS, and some of the developers aren't talking. Illumos, which runs OpenZFS however, has stated that OpenZFS umbrellaed projects will be kept as close to GPL as possible while remaining CDDL.

So in short, don't hold your breath.

Maybe gnutls could need an update, website has 3.3.16
while current still has 3.2.15

LLVM 3.6.2 is out!

harfbuzz is now at 1.0.1! As pointed out by Phoronix, it implements Microsoft's Universal Shaping Engine. For those of you who do not care for Phoronix, I point you to here and here for more information on what the Universal Shaping Engine is and what it means for the world's languages.

One of the failings of Phoronix is that it makes it very hard to get to the source packages. For convenience's sake, you can download it from here.

In short, I think it's a worthy update to -current.

Kudos to Behdad Esfahbod.

This guy maintains/develop/contribute to a lot of projects. Ok he works @ Google, but nobody's perfect...

Nevertheless, he's done a great job with harfbuzz.

getmail could benefit from an upgrade to 4.48. I had bug induced error messages when trying to grab messages from gmx. It said messages were offered but not found, that the server was broken. Updating from 4.47 to 4.48 fixed it and according to the changelog it was indeed a bug.

Might it be possible to copy these lines from rc.S into rc.M as well?

I worry that when a newly-installed system boots for the first time, one of the first things it does is ssh-keygen the system keys (via rc.sshd sshd_start()), when the /dev/urandom is potentially predictable.

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