Before I begin: I only want to learn, I DON'T WANT TO START A FLAME WAR!!!

I'm interested to hear your experience with your favourite upgrade tool. I found three such tools, but there may be more:

slackpkg
slapt-get
swaret

A lot of threads on this forum deal with swaret vs. apt-get and such. Then, some people use slapt-get or slackpkg.

I have been using swaret myself, so far, without problems. Other people experienced a lot of trouble when upgrading to recent GNOME version.

I'd really be interested to learn about your experiences with your favourit upgrade tool Which one do you use, and why? Did you make any tests or comparisons to find out which one of the tools available suits your needs best?

From the manpages I get the impression that swaret, slapt-get and slackpkg are very similar in features. But what about reliability?

swaret appears to be the most popular tool in that category, but experienced Debian users say, it's not even similar to apt-get. What about slapt-get, then?

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Regards

gargamel

swaret works really good except for the losing sound issue.

Losing sound? If you upgrade alsa, make sure you also upgrade the kernel (and vice versa). If you don't, it won't work. It's that simple

i use gftp and compare my files with ftp://mirror.ac.uk/, i dont trust update progs, dropline-installer least of all!!

Yep - I just check the changelogs while generally surfing with mozilla and 'upgradepkg' to install them.

Saying 'Ack! My $UPDATER borked my system! What'd it do? How do I fix it?' would suck. Saying 'Well, I screwed that up, better try this' is much better and, apparently, needs to be said much less frequently.

i tried swaret and updated my 9.1 to 10rc1, it worked realy good, but sometimes it missess some files, so u have to execute swaret --update -a several times

Thats probably what happend to me.

i am using swaret, without any problems, it is a great tool, but I think it uses too much(!!!) CPU!
Have you any experiences with slackpkg or slapt-get?

Yes, I too want to know what differentiates slapt-get and swaret. From what I understand, apt-get rules only because of the sheer number of packages it can download thanks to Debian. Therefore, having slapt-get seems redundant to me if it doesn't have more mirrors and more packages than swaret.

Then you really don't understand the difference in Debian and Slackware. Yes, the Debian repository is huge The binaries are also built and tested for the specific designated release and you can be certain they work. But more importantly Debian is built around dependencies and checking for them. It is built that way from the ground up. Slackware is not built that way. So slapt-get and swaret are efforts to add dependency checking onto a distro that is not designed for it. It makes that process much tougher and with less consistent results. Certainly Debian or the rpm based distros do not always get sane results from the dependency checking and are not perfect. That is part of the reason I suppose Pat v. has never wanted to go down that trail. Leaving it up to the wisdom of his users.

I've been using slapt-get and I like it because of it's simplicity and never had any problems with it. I recommend you to try them all.

I found that sometimes it's because the mirror itself is not completely in sync with the master site when I do my swaret --upgrade. Although the package index has some new packages but the package files are not yet available on the mirror.

hello
these days i use both swaret & slapt get , cuz
1 - swaret is realy fast but u can't get newest files quikly, and sometimes misses

2 - slapt-get sloow, but u can get newest files quikly..as soon as they available ..

my own experience..

i use swaret, i updraged from 9.1 to current and didn't have any problems

I'm with Tuttle and digiot on this...............I only use the Slackware tools to install/upgrade pkgs, keeping an eye on the ChangeLog.txt for security fixes, and for the newer source files and current patches used by Slack as I don't trust such third-party tools completely when it comes to the system itself..............And I'm a do-it-yourselfer at heart so I have fun doing things on my own.........

For instance, I'm still running a Slack 9.1 system with an upgraded X/KDE setup with upgraded packages I made myself..............I tend to make my own packages using build scripts, too (I've said goodbye to Checkinstall a long time ago), as I have an Athlon (K7) CPU and like to optimize my packages for it with the '-mcpu=athlon' compiler flag..........

However, I do find the '-dep' switch in Swaret to be useful occasionally, so I keep Swaret around for that purpose.............at least until I come up with a good script to check for dependencies (maybe using the 'ldd' command) and add it to my "custom commands" thread........