I really would like to know if we could make an announcement discouraging the use of these pieces of software, due to their replacement of important system files and downloading broken packages. Many of the problems on this board are because people use these.

I think it's a good idea to make up a list of products that seem to cause a lot of trouble, especially for someone new (like me). I'd start the list with swaret. I'm sure it's a great piece of software, but for a newbie, it is trouble.

swaret is still active??? Humm thought it was lost and slapt-get was the thingy... Oh well

Now as for DL Gnome and this is from experience....
It is best installed over a virgin (fresh) Slack install after you have INSTALLED and RAN gnome at least once and configured it to your likins' as well as having set the xorg.conf.

Once you install the dropline-install and have installed DL.. Remove the dropline installer and never run it again.
If you do run it again either to upgrade DL or remove (uninstall) dropline make sure your backups are done cause you are about to break something for sure.
This is comming from my righthand PVM box that has dropline installed on it. The PVM head is currently building evolution 1.4.6 (stable) as I have just finish rebuilding the OS after a crash that involved a DL Gnome upgrade.
It totally wrecked the xserver and system wide permissions. That was Sunday, 29 Aug I just finished getiing him back to full speed yesterday with the last of the scsi drives loaded today.
So be happy with DL Gnome on the first install or not use it at all.
I am happy to say that the stock Gnome 2.6 is much faster that DL and that there really is not that much difference in the bells and whistles.

You can pretty much make the standard gnome do anything DL does... the only thing I haven't gotten going is the patched xorg that boots with a black screen from init 3.

As for swaret, it works great for keeping current with the --current or --10.0 upgrades but I wouldn't use it with any other repos for sure... just my 2 cents...

I second the motion. Maybe a "Swaret and DL, try at your own risk" Sticky. I don't use either myself, (tried Swaret once, didn't like it), but I'm not against them. It seems a lot of newer users try them before the rest of the box is fully configured, which messes them up when trying to troubleshoot.
To each his own, but one spot for the problems these programs cause would be nice.

yea i made the mistake of trying Dropline. Didnt notice anything special. Ive suck with 2.6 since

I would really appreciate a moderator's feedback.

Considering the controversy that these apps bring about, I doubt the Board would want to be seen as taking a position. But I am not a moderator nor play one on TV.

I'm with ringwraith on this one. So somepeople have had some problems with these two apps. Does that mean that we should warn everyone not to use them? If so, I would like to recommend that we also warn everyone about using hotplug, x, alsa, udev, samba, apache, sendmail, mysql, and cups. Those seem to give people a lot of trouble, too. Also add to the list any packages that you haven't compiled yourself, because you really never know what you are getting.

Following these new recommendations, you'll have a lovely command line installation of Slackware with no sound and devices that may or may not be loading properly. Sounds like fun, huh?

/sarcasm

People decide they want to try Slackware. They read up on it and get it installed, hopefully without any problems. The less they read, the more problems that they have. Then they blindly install swaret adn dropline, not reading up on them at all. Expect problems, just like with everything else. Always, the less you read, the more problems that you have. I think eelriver was correct, poeople try to install stuff without making sure they know what they are doing. Very little is configured correctly, and that snowballs the more apps you add.

I think a better soution to all of this is a sticky that says "Before you go installing stuff, use the search feature to see what other's experiences were." Seems to make more sense than damning a select few applications that really do work if you read about how to use them and what they do.

X, sendmail, apache, etc. are very standard in linux, and many come by default. By contrast, the applications I've mentioned remove and change important system files, and are NOT well known software.

The "application" you mentioned not plural... DLG replaces system files... swaret doesn't unless you specifically uncomment/add linux packages repos.

I hope my comment was not taken as an endorsement of swaret or dropline. I would not recommend that any one use them. But if they do, that is up to them. The Board is full of problems brought about by the use of both. But I would not think the Board would want to be seen as taking a position on the matter. But of course that is up to them.