Is it safe to upgrade everything to Slackware Current?
 

I just installed Slackware and want to upgrade the system to the slackware current branch. I did a swaret --update and then a swaret --upgrade . There is a bunch of stuff to upgrade and I said yes to all. I'm wondering if this was safe or not? Would some stuff need to be recompiled if some packages were upgraded and such?

If you did not change the /etc/swaret.conf to current level (default is 9.1) then it will only be Slackware-9.1 with patch packages.

Is it save? I screwed up my Slackware 9.0 with swaret upgrade to current. :)

Well I changed 9.1 in /etc/swaret.conf to current and upgraded everything. Am I doomed? :(

Most likely, you're pretty much safe. The only things you might possibly screw up majorly are lilo and the kernel.

If you replaced any one of these, you better run lilo before rebooting. However, if I'm not mistaken, these two things are in the default swaret exclude list.

I didn't upgrade LILO or the kernel. So good; I'm glad to know this is safe. :)

Those are excluded by default. I have used swaret in the past without any problems. Prefer slapt-get nowadays but that's about the same.

After reinstalled 9.1 I've not let rc.hattpd to start at boot, yesterday as I tried to bring httpd to run it complained about not able to find "libexec/mod_vhost_alias.so" etc..

I do "ls -la /usr/libexec" and found the xxx.so modules are not in /usr/libexec, but they are on "/usr/libexec/apache", so just replace all the libexec/mod_xxx.so with libexec/apache/mod_xxx.so will do it. Tha apply also to similar thing in /etc/apache/mod_ssl.conf ..

Just a notice in case someone stucked with ..

Yeah, I'm having problems getting apache to load up on my rig, too. As soon as I boot it up and get on the internet with it, I'll post the error messages. All I know off the top of my head is when I run "apachectl start" or --start, whichever switch it is, it complains about some file being missing or something.

the command for starting apache-httpd is apachectl start just look at /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd. Make a chomd 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd then it will be started at boot..

Edit ur /etc/apache/httpd.conf n make a "query replace" from "libexec" with "libexec/apache" then it will be fine I bet. Do it also with /etc/apache/mod_ssl.conf if u had enabled mod_ssl at the bottom of httpd.conf ..

In VIM u will do it like this (supposed the x is the line number where the libexec/.. is n y is the last line number where it apperead, then:

:x,ys/libexec/libexec\/apache/g

That will replace the appearances of "libexec" with "libexec/apache from line number x through y in the file u are editing with VIM.

I have a secondary server that was installed with 8.0 and I've pretty much upgraded everything manually to Current with no problems.. not sure how swaret works as I like to do it manually but you shouldn't really have any problems upgrading to Current.

I have looked back to my /etc/swaret.conf, I have found one possible bugs of my self:

VERSION=9.1
ROOT=file:/home/ftp/slw/current
#ROOT=ftp://ftp.slackware.at/slackware-$VERSION

If I were upgrading from a ftp/http-site, swaret would fetch from a slackware-9.1 tree, which is correct. But if I used "ROOT=file:/home/ftp/slw/current" swaret will be fetching from a current-tree. That could have caused the inharmony between packages for "current" and "9.1".

Another problem that came up a few months ago with swaret and programs of such ilk. If you look throught the current changelogs, there was a withdraw of an update because of a bug, they recommended that you go back to the old version. Of course the auto updaters could not do that not knowing they should. So even if you use an auto update program you need to watch the change logs and know what is going on with your system.

well if this comment is helpfully for you, I must say I always upgrade my package of slack 9.1 whit the packages of slackware current, and until today noting has gone wrong. But i don't upgrade it whit swaret i do it manually, from slackware.com but i don't think that's make a different. anyway, I haven't upgrade kernel or lilo from my slack 9.1 to slackware current, but i did upgrade my KDE whit kde 3.2 from kde.org and it didn't miss up nothing. So I think you could use slackware current packages =P

I had had several partition of slackwares. I used to upgrade them from the current-tree also previously. But I used swaret 1.3 at that time. Due to a bad partition I'd deleted all of the slackware partitions and did a new install directly from the current-tree (actual of 5 days ago).

I usaually use rsync to actualize my current-tree. So my current-tree should be identical to the current-tree from the official slackware site b4 I did the reinstall. It installed kernel 2.4.24, kernel 2.4.23 was deleted by rsync already. I believe I did swaret --update/--upgrade after reboot. But after booting-up it looked modules from /lib/modules/2.4.23, which is not available ..

So I just let that partition, n now installed the slackware 9.1 on another partition. Do swaret update/upgrade after that. For both of the partition I used swaret 1.6.0.5 now. I don't know is that the problem of swaret or it is my missconfiguration of swaret.

I remembered to have had installed directly from current-tree also, at that time it had kernel 2.4.23 and I used swaret 1.3. So really don't what was problem swaret version 1.6 or .. ??

i have Slack 9.1, edited the etc/swaret.conf, entered version=current, commented out the kernel exclude, then entered swaret --update && swaret --upgrade -u && swaret --purge in my root crontab for 2300 nitely.
the boot this morning complained about gstreamer files not being ELF format, and refused to start up apache (as noted above), but everything else is really good, and when i checked my ./machine-update -i script, is says i'm running 2.4.24 kernel.
Sweet.