I do it for fun

yes.. and for the adrenaline rush... of course: will it still work after....???? I love bugs, they're my dayjob... ;-)

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So this is actually a 'thing'. I wondered.

I find that very odd. What sort of updates are you doing that risk anything but the new app not working? For me one of the major benefits of Slackware is that the worst that can happen, even if compiling directly from source and running "make install" instead of making a package, is that the new app won't run... until you fix it. The rest of my system is never at risk on Slackware.

He must work on Windows machines......

Yes, great toys to crash, give me 5 min ;-)

I use slackpkg to update my system. Usually, I do it as soon as new updates are released. However, being that I use the current branch on my production machine, if the update is a major one, I often wait for several days, just to be sure that everything is OK.

@Lysander666,

You should take into account that if you are running stable, currently 14.2, that updates are *mostly* security related.

IMO any security updates should be taken seriously and applied ASAP.

But caution should be used for kernel updates if you switch to a generic kernel or generate a initrd or if you use nVidia graphic drivers.

Updating through slackpkg is easy on my low-powered system since it just downloads and installs the .txz files. I have indeed switched to generic and use an initrd. Can you let me know why I should be cautious in this instance? EDIT: answered here https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...3/#post5812603

My desktop uses a beefy ATI card and my netbook onboard Intel graphics so no problems with nVidia there.

I currently refrain from installing updates from sbopkg because they don't look that necessary to me, e.g. qpdfview has had an incremental update which I haven't installed, and I have to rebuild QMplay2 for the libass update, which I can't be bothered to do currently since it works perfectly as is.

Well, for some people running current the goal is to find bugs before you do.

Well I am mostly not looking for them; I grow them ;-)

A reason to run current is better/easier support for my newish hardware; and then, yes, part of the fun is installing and thereby testing updates as they come along; mostly it is fine; sometimes a bug that is often wide-spread, i.e. not immediately Slackware related, but still important to (help) to identify. One learns a lot that way. Waste of time?? See it as a hobby.... ;-)

This is less likely on stable, but due to the recent flaws found in CPUs might be relevant.

If you switched to the generic kernel, generated a initrd, set LiLo to boot Slackware by default and let slackpkg upgrade your kernel, you can be in for some work. My advice there would be to blacklist kernel updates and make sure that you read about upgrading kernels. Personally I just run the huge kernel, so I just let it update kernels as our BDFL sees fit. Sure there might be some performance gain by switching and generating a initrd, but from what I've seen it is slight (for me at least).

There can be security patches and fixes with packages from SBo as well, one recent one that I use is Transmission that recently had a security patch added. So you should at least keep an eye on them.

Yea, the Slackware maintainers catch most of the issues before they release packages, but some issues won't be present themselves unless tested on a wide variety of configurations, this is where current comes in. That said most of the bugs I find spend time on are for programs available at SBo which can have bugs/regressions due to something in Slackware updating or when the program itself updates.

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Yes, very valid; that's why this thread is helpful

BTW when I grow bugs I am literal; no computer-speak here. But to analyse/present results of experiments I use a lot of SBo-stuff some of which, I would argue, could be better in the main repository because of their high level of interoperability with stuff produced by windows/mac-programs one has to share at many work-places. Libreoffice, inkscape etc. are my tools of choice (together with gimp) which basically replaces functionality of the kde-suite which I have not installed.

Other, more specific stuff on SBo I use as well and I also run into programs that don't work/compile in current. In many cases a more recent release of the software, especially when that has been corrected to adhere to gcc-7 standards, often compiles/works again (providing the slackbuild is not heavily tweaked to adapt the software to Slackware; then a simple version change often won't work)..

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Updates to poppler and various libraries will often break Inkscape and KSnapshot, but I've been staying updated to -current for a couple of years now and I see no reason to change. If Inkscape breaks, I usually go to ponce's repo and get the newest build. Alternatively one can create symlinks that make things work again.

The benefits of staying with -current outweigh the occasional minor hassles. Although 14.2 is "stable", it doesn't mean that -current is "unstable", per se.

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