Have you had good or bad experiences with swaret? If you don't use swaret, why not?

I have not had any major problems, but only because I don't expect more of swaret than it is capable of. I check the changelog before each update, and sort out any renamed/added/removed packages by hand afterwards.

I think it kicks ass and is a really useful tool when used appropriately.

I've had nothing but good expirience with it, even though i'm running current with the newest dropline-gnome, and that seems to bork alot of peoples systems. Not mine though .

I still wouldn't recommend it for anything beyond upgrades though. (installing programs your don't already have etc...). It's no where near the maturaty of apt-get or portage, and doesn't have many files beyond the slack system files. Also, I don't think it has been checking dependancies for me, although I can't be sure...

No problems here at all, so far. Yeah, I've been wondering if it's missing dependencies, too.

It "hosed" my slackware 9.0 but no problem since 9.1.

Had a bad experience with swaret -- not interested in continuing the pain. -- J.W.

Yea, Swaret is Crap, and who ever wrote it should be
hung by their Perl scripts...............

I have missed up and removed pkgtools a few times but nothing knoppix can't fix

-Joey

Its been great. It has saved me much time.

I used it to upgrade my Slackware 9.1 to current and never had any problems with it.
But I am not sure if I should use it for Slack 10.0 too....
I guess I´ll give it a try on my old laptop, when the time has come for the first upgrade.

I don't use and I don't trust third party packagemanagers. Updating Slackware using the standard package tools is easy, so there is no need at all to use something like swaret. I understand that swaret will introduce some kind of dependency checking. That's something I do NOT want at all. Dependency checking kills flexibility.

For example: if you decided to install a self compiled version of a library which was used by other programs as well, dependency checking packagemanagers start wining about something missing what is already there. In the worst case the packagemanager will start overwriting the files you compiled yourself and break things.

So no swaret, nor any other packagemanager for me besides the standard pkgtools Slackware provides and which does the job excellent for me.

Although swaret attempts some rudimentary dependency checking by default, it's easy to turn off.

The key is to ONLY use official sources. I trust packages that Pat V. builds, other than that build them yourself. The only problems I've ever had is getting broken packages from unofficial sources. That includes dropline gnome & linuxpackages.net. Slackware is the easiest distro to build packages for, as long as you have checkinstall on your system.

Technically, swaret allowed me to "hose" my system, it didn't do it on its own. I think it was the switch from 8.1 to 9.0 that gcc changed and the 9.0 binaries were incompatible with the 8.1 binaries and current contained binaries from both. Pointing swaret at current during that time allowed me to really screw things up. Hence, when I use swaret, I don't point it at current.