Is Patrick OK?
 

Looking at the changelogs, it seems there has been no activity for nearly a month in the intel (32 or 64 bit) branches. Is Patrick OK? Is there anything we could do?

Worried of San Jose

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org

On occasion there are lulls in activity. I am not in the inner circle, but, I am guessing that there is perhaps a large set of updates that is being battle tested prior to release.

It's not unusual for Pat and team to do all of their stuff behind closed doors, and we've certainly seen a long lull followed by a massive update during development cycles of the past, but this cycle there seems to have been a pattern of lulls followed by a trickle of minor updates. I must admit that I've also had an uneasy feeling about it for a while now.

I feel the same...so little upgrades in current for a so long time I'm glad bimboleum raised this question!

Yep. It is a bit unsettling for me as well, but, we have seen long lulls before. I am hopeful that some updates are released to the mirrors soon. :)

Don't worry.....be happy!

I've been a Slackware user for some years now and have seen the ebb & flow of updates. Believe me, one month is no big deal. People get update fever it seems.
I'm thinking along the same lines as hitest.

I don't mind the lull, I just hope everyone is doing well.

I second that!

Although Slackware is surely a major part of Patrick's life, he does have a private human life beyond Slackware of which we catch occasional glimpses even here. We can only wish it to be the happiest life possible!

I too, have had a recent lull in my own activities - it happens for a variety of reasons.

I hope that Pat's is for happy reasons!

He's been around...

Fewer updates may mean the new Slackware is getting close.

The lack of activity has become concerning as there have been, over the last month, 3 releases of Firefox (Edit in: 4, as of late afternoon on 3 April 2015) and 2 of SeaMonkey, which fixed critical vulnerabilities in both browsers. We have not seen those updates.

Then there is openssh and openssl, etc.

What has also troubled me is here we are almost 17 months after the release of 14.1 and we still have KDE 4.10.5 is -current. KDE 4.14.3 was the last official release of the 4.x series and the KDE developers have moved on to plasma 5, or whatever it is called.

I hope all is well.

If Patrick wants to share news about his health or anything personal, he will.

Thus, as others I wish him the best, but I think that speculations on this topic are useless.

Other than that, as Slackware's development and maintenance occurs behind closed doors, the only reliable source of information is the ChangeLogs, as always.

I'm glad this question was raised. Not that I'm all that concerned about the impending collapse of Slackware, nor that -current will become unstable, but it *has* been awhile since the last release. I wonder what the hold-up is. I hope we find out soon.

Member response
 

Hi,

Look here:KDE 5_15.02 release for Slackware-current

I guess I wasn't clear as, with all due respect, that completely misses the point.
There have been some improvements to KDE, but plasma 5 is not one of them, IMHO.
With KDE 4.13, they changed their indexing system and it greatly reduced the amount of resources used by KDE. I would be happy with KDE 4.13.1, but as 4.14.3 is the last in the series, and it was released last November, why not go with it. I've been running it in -current and it works just fine.
Plasma 5 has a ways to go before it will have the KDE applications/features ported from 4.14.3, but even then, it is about the ugliest DE I've seen since the early days of ms-windows. Before anyone says it is "new and modern," take it from someone who has been around a few years, there is little to nothing about the design that is "new and modern." It has all been done before, some of it as far back as the 1930s, if not the 1890s.
-)