Cumulative patches update
 

Hello, does it exist in Slackware (or linux in general) the concept of a cumulative service? Especially for the security patches. I mean, in the z world we have the cumulative service we do about every 3 or 6 months with all the fixes (plus their prerequisites) that have been released in the meantime. We do not just apply a single fix (or a group of them) at the time it is released (unless it is a hyper one, meaning a must apply one). Does this also apply to the Slackware?

Regards, Apostolos

I don't think we do have them in Slackware. Updates are delivered per application as needed.

Nor in linux in general. But you do have kind of that service, in term of point releases in some distribution. Like debian 8.7 to 8.8. Though, in most distributions, including Slackware, there is no need for that kind of thing. You just update regularly, like once per week, and you are good to go. Some distributions do supply you with tools to automate updates and upgrades, if you just feel lazy to do it yourself. As far as I can remember, there are no such tools in Slack, though you could get some bash script in combination with cron job to do it.

Anyway, cumulative service is kind of silly thing in Linux world, in my opinion. If you are on stable version, most updates/upgrades are security based, so it is best to apply them as they come.

If you run 'slackpkg update' today on unpatched Slackware 14.2, you will get (for example) mozilla-firefox upgraded directly
from mozilla-firefox-45.2.0esr-x86_64-1.txz
to mozilla-firefox-52.1.2esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz

There is no need for any of the intermediate versions of mozilla-firefox that existed last year or early this year.

As others have stated, patches aren't cumulative. In actuality, Slackware patches aren't really "patches", but instead are newer packages to replace the older one. Because of this, when a "patch" is installed, the old package is completely removed (except for config files) and the new one is installed. So, there is no need to install each "patch", because the latest "patch" should be the latest version of the package that the distribution maintainer (Patrick Volkerding, in Slackware's case) has made available.

@dejank, Slackware does include slackpkg, which can check your selected mirror for updates to Slackware and can optionally download and install/upgrade them. It doesn't include anything to automate this, but you could add commands in your cron to automate it (although, I generally don't recommend automating things like that as you should be checking the ChangeLog before you upgrade to see if there's any "gotchas".

I know, was happy Slack user for some time :) I was just explaining what you've said, that it does not have automated tools/scripts ready, like for example unattended-upgrades on debian and debian based distros and that someone could create bash script to do it via cron. But yes, I would not do it, though it is because I like to have more control over what is updated/upgraded.

You shouldn't cron slackpkg, by checking it monthly you can make a sort of cumulative upgrade. The philosophy is to sign up to the newsletter and get notified on the important security patches. As @dejank said the point is to know/follow up the packages you're upgrading.

Thank you all for the valuable comments and advises.

Regards, Apostolos.