alienBOB and myself have put online some trees which may be of interest to people looking for previous versions of Slackware or multilib packages.

The new trees provided by alienBOB are 'cumulative' archives of the slackware64-current and multilib trees spanning years of Slackware development - housing nearly every package since the initial releases of Slackware64 and multilib.

If you've ever needed to downgrade a Slackware package to a previous version for (because of a driver issue, feature change, etc) you will know the value of 'cumulative' trees such as this.

The trees we now have online are:
https://slackware.uk/cumulative/slackware64-current/ - A tree containing every package added to 64bit -current, going back to the first ever release of Slackware64.
https://slackware.uk/cumulative/multilib/ - alienBOB's multilib repository going back to the first releases of multilib for 13.0. Unfortunately some compat32 packages are missing from this archive, but the recent trees do include a full set of compat32 packs.

There is also a new tree for 32bit slackware-current: https://slackware.uk/cumulative/slackware-current/ - however, this tree is brand new, so will only accrue changes as of today. Unfortunately alienBOB did not have an archive of changes to 32bit current, and my google-fu was not strong - I couldn't find one online.

If anyone has a cumulative archive of the 32bit -current tree going back however many years, please get in touch with me - if possible, I'd like to take a copy of the tree from you to put a historical archive online.

Going forward, the trees will be synced with their original counterparts after each update, so things will be kept up to date for the long term.

Hopefully most of you will never have cause to install previous versions of Slackware packages, but the trees are there for those people who know why they need older packages.

Cheers!

Both you and Eric deserve praise for your initiative to save the .br archive. Linux community spirit at its best.

1 members found this post helpful.

Weirdly I was just about to post asking if a repository of older slackware64-current packages exists, as I spent the last few hours solving an issue I had. You guys have done a brilliant job, and I'm sure its going to save a few peoples skins in the future.

I do have a question though. Is there a way to find older build scripts? Personally I'd like to find the build script (and patches) used to recently build mariadb 10.3.16 (or 10.3.15) in slackware64-current, but I'll ask it as a general question to keep it related to the thread.

Unfortunately, the buildscripts and associated files are not versioned in the main tree, so they would be over-written by each sync into the cumulative tree.

Because of that, I made the decision not to include the source/ directories; since they are essentially the same as in the main tree, just with the odd old file hanging around.

If you want to know how the build scripts (don't) change over time, you could have a look at the git repository where I maintain the history of the Slackware sources: https://git.slackware.nl/current/
You can check the time of a package update in the ChangeLog.txt against the timestaps of changes to the build scripts and thus determine which source you need to checkout.

3 members found this post helpful.

Many thanks tadgy and Alien Bob for the work that you do for us!

1 members found this post helpful.

thats quite a collection of old versions, i am sure many old slackers will find that handy, thank you much, i have bookmarked it just in case i need to pull an old version of something

Did you guys just have all these binaries laying around? I thought packages were replaced and not backed up when new ones were uploaded to those -current servers.

Usually, when you rsync to mirror a remote location (as mirrors do for Slackware) you use rsync's --delete option to remove old files which are no longer on the remote side.

However, if you omit the --delete option, the package files on the local end are not removed, and you end up with a tree containing more than one version of the file. This is what alienBOB has done since the first releases of Slackware64 and multilib. Hence why we now have a cumulative archive

2 members found this post helpful.