With 15.0 in beta, it's becoming clear that some of my pet requests won't be accommodated and that I will have to rebuild some of the stock packages myself. I don't have a particular problem with that but I'd like to streamline the way future upgrades are handled. I've previously maintained a local server with private updates and additional packages to keep a lab of about a dozen machines up to date using slapt-get but more recently moved to slackpkg & slackpkg+. What is missing though is a way to know when a base package has been updated so that I can know that I need to rebuild/update my private version.

Take, for example, ffmpeg which is currently at version 4.4. I can rebuild it with whatever additional options I want and put the result onto my private server which I have given higher priority than a standard slackware mirror. That much is easy. However when the stock version has been updated to, say, version 4.5, it will be silently ignored since the private server (with only version 4.4) has priority. I should therefore update my private version - that's understood - but how can I know I need to do that?

Is there a way that slackpkg(plus), or even slapt-get, can be verbose enough to let me know that a lower priority server has a higher package version than the higher priority server?

chris

Couldn't you use the change logs to see if the package has been changed beyond rebuilds?

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Thanks, that's not a bad idea - I could write a script to do that periodically. I guess I was hoping there might be something in the existing tools that I could use - sort of like a blacklist entry that says to ignore a package but different to a blacklist entry in that you're told about it being ignored.

chris

Isn't that a job for slackpkg+ greylist ?

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I didn't know about that feature - it's just about perfect. For big updates (like -current sometimes has) I'd still be worried that I may overlook an unchecked package but that shouldn't be a problem after 15.0 is released, when I'd expect updates to be much smaller.

Thanks for the suggestion,
chris