I've heard people say that using a beta distro-release such as Slackware-current is a bad idea. But I always thought that the new packages that were added to the tree were stable to begin with. It's just that <that guy who releases all the slackware releases, can't remember name> didn't want to call it a new version yet.

What do you think?


--tarballedtux

My understanding of Slackware-current is that Patrick is still working
on getting everything integrated. It's unstable because at any time
any package may be missing dependencies, only half installed, or
any number of other problems. Sure, the packages are stable
releases, but the entire conglomeration of them isn't necessarily
stable. Putting together a linux distribution isn't as easy as slapping
a bunch of packages together on a disk -- check out Linux From
Scratch. . .

Slackware-current is the development branch of the distribution. For the most part things will work under current, but it is still being tested for stability. Look through the change logs , say the last 5-10 entries in current, and you should understand what I mean. As an example there WERE (are?) some problems with the new RPM binaries so they had to be regressed a few versions. If you happened to be using current before this was fixed and needed to use RPM...

Overall current is fine for a tinkerer or someone who wants to test/help make the new release of Slackware stable. But it is absolutely not for production server use, IMHO not production workstation use either. Not to say current is crash happy, but it has quirks, and quirks are not good for 24/7 servers.

I´ve been using slack-current for almost 3 months now (almost since it got out). I´ve yet to see any problem...

The box is running 24/7 ssh, http, ftp, pop and smtp servers and used as a worksation almost every day, and i still haven´t witnessed any problem due to it being an "unstable" release..

The only real problem i see, is that it is built on the new gcc, therefore many or most of the .tgz slack package (which are built on the old gcc) will not work or have problems.

If can live happily building every software you need then you will probably be just fine.

Mux.