The only way out of this is to admit that 3rd parties have a huge problem with the concept of rolling distro (aka current) as it stands now and basically pick a date (like anytime) to freeze current AND, the toughest part, agree with PV to release just essential security updates for that "snapshot", while he can continue in peace developing 15.0.

I think it would be a compromise, not sure PV's Slackware war chest supports such arrangements without modifications, but I'm quite sure that otherwise the general level of annoyance is bound to slowly increase.

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THe development of Slackware is not a rolling-release analog. The "snapshot" you talk about would be the actual 15.0 release. Slackware-current is a development tree, not the product of a rolling release.
So, the fact that -current is a fast-moving target poses issues for everyone, not just me. If you compiled a series of packages from SBo scripts, then these packages are candidates for breakage as well.

When you have many packages out there in repositories, people will want that they work. Keeping my repositories (regular, restricted, ktown, multilib) in shape costs time. And sometimes the updates in -current happen at an inconvenient time and then it can take 3rd-party packagers like me several days to get new packages out that address the updates in slackware-current.

I don't have the spare time anymore which is required for all that. Which is why I decided to reduce the frequency of Plasma5 updates and also introduce 'boost-compat' and 'icu4c-compat' packages which contain the libraries of several older versions of boost and icu4c. These two packages cause the most breakage. Having these 'compat' packages installed prior to upgrading slackware-current will prevent a lot of breakage.

So again, a "snapshot" is not going to happen. A 15.0 release is going to happen, but only when Pat has all the pieces working together that he wants to be part of a 15.0 release.

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I'm well aware of the points you mention, including SBo. The difference is our time perspective and you probably have more intel on that: if 15.0 is coming in 2019, maybe 2020 then of course it's worth waiting. On the other hand we could very well be finding ourselves somewhere in the middle of a cycle, and I don't have any indication as to why not. The old release pattern is gone and there's nothing to stick to. If so, I'm just saying that an unofficial snapshot release (with all its problems) would be better than potentially waiting another few years for marketable release. But yes, even that is dependent on PV, I mean there's no easy fix, or else I'm sure you would have done it already. Anyway, I do see it as a problem and, historically speaking, a new situation for everyone involved.

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I do agree with you.

BTW, The roadmap for xfce 4.14 https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap says it will be released in 2019-08-11 - Xfce 4.14 (Final Release)

May Pat waiting for this?

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We've gone quite a while without an official release, and we're seeing the stresses involved with that right here on this thread even. 14.2 is definitely getting long in the tooth (I've come across software projects that require higher gcc than what is in 14.2's patches). I hope that Pat is cognizant of this situation. It makes me wonder what the actual roadmap to 15.0 is, because otherwise I too will be expecting to have to eventually recompile all my software as -current continues to progress. Might also be helpful to know so people in the community can provide any additional support or fixes for anything that is currently blocking progress. As it is, I rely on the excellent work that Eric provides to us for these additional projects (ktown, libreoffice, etc) because unfortunately there simply aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done as it is.

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For what it is worth there is no stress here although I acknowledge that I a simple end user. I am happy to allow the process to take its course...

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New situation how so? Most stable distros average a new release every 2-3+ years. Not sure why some keep beating the dead horse (when is the next release) so to speak. As Eric stated, it will come, and as we all know it will happen when PV, Slack and Bob are ready.

A bit of hyperbole? Red Hat just released RHEL 8.0 a few days ago. RHEL 7 was released 5 years ago. I don't think *anyone* would accuse Red Hat of not being marketable. Debian 10 will be at least a few years after Debian 9.
Slackware 14.2 was released in July 2016. Slackware 15.0 will arrive when it is ready. I have faith in Pat's ability to deliver an outstanding operating system.
I think we should relax.

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spent last two weeks patching. Working on kde5 dependencies . So many issues do to hurd of cats systemd. plasma 5 may never be ready.

What is this thing you call roadmap?

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I will agree in a heartbeat with this suggestion, because Baloo was also always, from my own experience, friendly just like a a hungry bear. Maybe its name was given with a meaning...

So, the perspective of a batch of fixes for it is a more that welcome perspective.

Maybe, Mr. Hameleers you'll be kind to made this update, please?

7.1, Update 1, March 5, 2015
7.2, Update 2, November 19, 2015
7.3, Update 3, November 3, 2016
7.4, Update 4, August 1, 2017
7.5, Update 5, April 10, 2018
7.6, Update 6, October 30, 2018

I had not seen ZhaoLin1457's request because he is on my ignore list, but I saw this one.
To both of you - you have not even looked at my repository, have you? Before you cry out like this, get your facts correct.

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@hitest
I don't think it's fair comparison when it comes to RHEL products.
For instance with RHEL7: between the first release and the last available, the Red-Hat devs have upgraded the desktop environment Gnome3 several times (3 or 4 times), they also have upgraded the Xorg stack as well as Mesa, in addition they regularly add a couple of new drivers to the kernel and remove/add few tools here and there (and/or databases if I'm not mistaken).

Since It takes so much time to get new Slackware releases I wished that kind of development could have been done but I don't think this will happen.

As an aside (and admittedly off topic) that's where I am headed for Slint, so far with just one big issue: we will keep Mate 1.18 for now, to avoid the potential pitfalls upgrading GTK+3. Honest: we stay with KDE4 though. But on the other hand I found no issue upgrading e.g. all the accessibility software hosted @ ftp.gnome.org to their latest stable release. Oh, and a try to upgrade boost was soon reverted.

So we can quietly wait for the release of Slackware-15.0, without complaining, as we ship a kernel 4.19.n that can handle recent hardware.