Apparently not and it is not about "entitlement" that you keep whining about.

IT IS ABOUT LEADERSHIP and the COMPLETE LACK thereof.

Leadership involves effective communication.
State secrets do not have to disclosed, but a good leader keeps people informed of the goals and direction of the organization and, where possible, how they plan to achieve those goals.

How long does it take to pen a few words saying, for example,

"I've decided to make a major change to the project, but be at ease as I think you will approve when you see the end result. This will involve recompiling major sections of the distribution, which is turn will delay any recent security upgrades. I estimate this will take 6 to 8 weeks, so please bear with me during this period.
Your patience will be rewarded.
Thank you."

That is all it takes and had it been done, one, this thread wouldn't have been necessary, and, therefore, two, it wouldn't have turned into the backbiting thread it has become.

Member response
 

Hi,
You are the one that started with personal remarks. I am sure you are not referring to 'The Basic School' as related to USMC but to basic elementary education standards. My education is way beyond elementary education which I took offense to that implication(s) by you in the flagrant[1] original statement.

I said over the last two months in a general overview of the package.txt. Plus six weeks to get things addressed is not that long since there are several areas that need attention. You did read the thread: [Slackware security] vulnerabilities outstanding 20140101 and maybe look at the content in: Status Update: Slackware LQ Security Thread Slackware users providing assistance with security. I did not see your involvement in either. Nothing more than criticism within this thread and as noted by other members elsewhere.

Slackware release will be here when it's ready and finished by PV!
Take it or Leave it! Your choice.
:hattip:

What part of Slack in Slackware are you not understanding?

If you don't like the timeline for the Slackware's security updates then do following:

(1) Change to another distribution. You are free to do that, that's true!

(2) Update the update yourself. You have a very good resource to find out what should be updated here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-a-4175489800/.

(3) Just wait until the security updates are officially coming from the Slackware team.

Very simple, just pick up one.

They were general remarks, you decided to take personally.


Oh, but I am. Why? Because the very FIRST thing on the agenda is, LEADERSHIP!

Scarce communication has always been one of Slackware's trademarks. Your suggestion sounds reasonable, but reading it in a ChangeLog would probably come as a shocking surprise, like Buster Keaton suddenly starting to speak in a silent movie. :)

The changelog might indeed be the wrong place, but the Slackware security mailing list certainly is not the wrong place to make users that trust in this mechanism aware of what is going on.

All good points, but, Slackers who have been with Slack for a good while know that inactivity in the changelog does not equal extinction.
Time for people to chill out just a bit. :)

I don't really think that Slackware is dead. What I think is that Slackware behaves like a dead distribution. There are good points made in that, of course, development of the new Slackware version is a major burden, that there are threads about security problems here on LQ, and so on. Nonetheless, I see the lack of communication as a major failure, especially when one keeps in mind that not all Slackers are regular visitors of LQ and that those people might instead use, for example, the security mailing list to get awareness of potential security problems, which went silent at the point security updates stopped. Those people might still think that there simply weren't security problems since then.
I will just quote what is told to us about the Slackware philosophy on the Slackware store:At this point Slackware fails its own philosophy at least in the last two points:
- It is not ease of administration when at any given point in time security patches stop to be delivered without any announcement or explanation and the admin has to get this information on the forums.
- I can't see any open development in Slackware at this point.

In short, at this point Slackware will not be recommended by me anymore until this situation improves.

Good. I don't want to be led.

That is outrageous oversimplification and you should be ashamed of yourself.

If you want to make the case that a specific vulnerability discovered since 2015-03-05:21:56:15 is actively being exploited on Slackware boxes in the real world, and therefore an update is now overdue, please do that right now, because we need to know. But in the absence of that, you are just blowing misinformation out of your immoderate backside.

My general opinion (fwiw) is that most distros have a crazy policy, with dozens of unproven patches going straight into the distro (worse still, backported by 9-to-5 code monkeys on autopilot) without any real contemplation about the risks. "Because Security". If Mr Volkerding looks at these vulnerabilities and thinks "90% of these are meh", he's right. And when the shit *really* *did* hit the fan (heartbleed and shellshock) we had fixes on day zero. Works for me.

I'm in the military, so I'm quite familiar with their culture... And quite often they will also tell you to "shut up and color". There are times to be a leader and times to be a follower. You are being neither. You are whining because you don't have the updates you desire (and you're not even worried about things other than Firefox and Seamonkey, even though there's security concerns for X, ntp, openSSL, php, etc). This screams a "me" attitude rather than a "we" attitude. But even if Pat's silence constitutes a lack of leadership, is it your place, as a private (to use your military analogy), to question the 4-star general's decision to remain quiet on a matter you think needs discussing? You'd be laughed out of the room.

He doesn't provide roadmaps, company goals, or directions he's taking Slackware to the general public. He provides you with a changelog of changes that have been published to -current. The difference here is you're not an employee of Slackware or a stock holder. You have no entitilement (yes, I used the word again) to know where Pat has plans to take Slackware. You have a desire to know, and he has no obligation to provide it to you.

But your demands for updates has nothing to do with leadership, but with followership. When you decided to "enlist" in the Slackware "service", you decided you'd follow all of the leaders' decisions. That includes the leader not providing updates in, what you deem, a timely matter.

If you want to talk about leadership, maybe you should spearhead ReaperX7's suggestion on creating unofficial Slackware patches when Pat hasn't released official ones (or at least slackbuilds capable of building the newer versions so people can create their own packages). You know, show some of the leadership that you seem to demand from others. Why don't you "promote" yourself to an "NCO" and show some leadership by trying to help everyone rather than complaining that Pat hasn't helped you?

Fair enough. :)
I predict that there will be updates in the near future. If I'm wrong I'll e-mail you a beer even though I know that it is a rather large attachment.

****hitest remembers the scene from Monty Python, "Bring out your dead"****

I agree on both points...

And monkeys on autopilot - I like that and think it is often a fair description of the process! Unproven patches going straight into the repos in haste is too often just so some functionally anonymous coder can look like they are on top of things, when they may actually be rather clueless, copy/paste... monkeys on autopilot.

With Slackware, the coder is never anonymous and there are never busy-work type security updates. Patrick is known to us and personally responsible to us in a way that most people would not and could not endure. It is surely a crushing responsibility that he takes totally seriously, and at the moment his judgement seems to be that his efforts are best applied to the code and testing and to not be engaged in public dialog about the code and testing.

I know that for myself when I am engaged in a task that carries great personal responsibility and requires extraordinary attention, I can become uncommunicative and focused on that task to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

Let's give him the space he obviously desires at this time.

No, I am not ashamed. Do you really want to tell us that security updates for Slackware only are valid after it turns out that they were exploited? I am pretty sure that you will change that opinion immediately when it is your machine that was hit by a security problem that was not fixed because someone thought: Until now no one was hit by that.
Security should be pro-active, not a "we fix it after the fact" thing.

hmms

Maybe he's busy on some big overhaul, maybe there are personal circumstances to which we do not need to know the details or maybe he's just getting some down time.

I'm pretty cool with all of the above.

This is not a spoon-fed distro, I'll patch myself the things that stand out, to my untrained eye, as being priority fixes for my use case, maybe get brave and dig a bit deeper and try a few things I've not tried before.

On the love v money spectrum I use Slack for the love, for the fun, I like it. I'm guessing a lot of others here do too else passions wouldn't be running so hot here.

Thinking out loud I'd guess most of the Slackware crew do too, so making this place too stressful, leaping up and down making demands isn't going to help their love either, isn't going to increase their fun and won't attract folks back to their keyboards where we want them.

Chill folks