Its not really trolling at this point. Slackware 14.2 came out in 2016 and since it is so rock solid stable it rarely changes outside of security fixes, making it great for many servers.

However when someone comes into irc or the forum with their recent hardware unable to run anything and probably not up to the task of maintaining a current install the best advice is often to tell them to use a different distro. Not to mention its increasingly becoming harder to update or add software to SBo when many developers have long since moved on from the software versions found in 14.2.

I get that many people have strong emotional attachments to Slackware, but objectively you gotta admit that its becoming harder to maintain and use a stable Slackware install. The hardware to run it on is becoming rarer as well.

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New thread open here

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...1/#post6147285

I have used this method with several versions of slackware not just going from a versioned number to current, but from another versioned number to a newer one. On this particular computer, before I decided to switch to slackware64-current. I used slackpkg to upgrade from older to newer stable versions. The slackware64 installation on this computer has never had a fresh install of slackware. This computer has a a restore from a backup on the previous computer. That computer was also a restore. My best guess was this slackware64 installation first installed fresh back in 2004.

Perhaps you are not aware of how slackpkg works. If you use slackpkg correctly nothing with stop working, especially going from 14.2 to -current. In the past there was a few things that needed to be done, one for example of comment out aaa_elflibs in blacklist. That no longer need to be done as it's no longer blacklisted. Slackpkg also handles upgrading key packages that need to be upgraded first so you don't need to do that manually before running slackpkg.

No problems here, krb and pam will be installed.
Not an issue, isl will be installed.
What mess? These will be properly taken care of.

I just completed upgrading slackware64-14.2 to slackware64-current, absolutely zero issues. That system is rebooted, running slackware64-current, also booted to runlevel 4, no issues. I "fixed" nothing unless you want to include a a few ".new" configuration files. This could be the only gotcha part of doing the upgraded using slackpkg. One needs to know your configuration files. I chose the (P)rompt option and for the most part simply chose chose (O)verwrite, a couple I verified the diff, one I chose to (K)eep and handle manually. There wasn't that many to go through either.

Got it. It's sleep time here, will follow up in that thread later.

Really? And how is no-dependency resolution slackpkg going to determine which packages were newly added as dependencies in -current? However, you may be right if to do slacker's dirty magic with full install which picks aaa_elflibs.

boooooooooooooooriiiing

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If you choose to not do a full install, you're choosing to manage dependencies yourself. Nobody here is going to manage them for you. This is one of the many reasons that a full install is recommended.

slackpkg has install-new which will prompt to install any packages that were "Added." on the ChangeLog.txt for the version you're running.

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The thing is that each package has a maintainer (except abandoned packages, I don't know how many). You would not want to override publicly someone's work, it's kind of impudent behavior. On the other hand, many those contributors are blocked by limitations of 14.2 and there is no -current SBo to post SB updates. Ponce's repository is his personal. And there are a lot of people who keep some stuff on their git repos, including me. There is no centralized place for -current SB scripts and this is really bad. So right now, there are a lot of people who switched to -current and there is no normal SBo for them. Every SlackBuild from SBo has to be verified and updated manually (sometimes just rewritten) and it's really painful.

The question if Slackware is dead seems to be reasonable.

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By comparison to the field that statement seems absurdly out of context. Debian Stable, for one example, has only a slightly newer kernel than Official 14.2 does and a great deal more flexibility, one of which makes it easy to install an even newer kernel as well as other packages that depend on the kernel. My 14.2 install is using a custom built 5.5.2 kernel.

Slackware Current is updated almost daily so exactly how do these facts bear asking the "dead" question?

I do recognize that you have run into some snags that you find painful but some of them you create for yourself by not employing Full Recommended Install, and others are just that you have some valid, but unusual requirements. That Slackware doesn't seem to suit your exacting needs is NOT the criteria for Dead. So why are you even here? Butthurt?

Seriously if Slackware is so painful and time consuming and your time is SO valuable, why waste in on negativity that helps nobody?

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It's none of your business why I'm here.

Ahhh... maybe you should look up the definition of "Community".

Edit: On second thought I have had enough of your non-productive negativity. Welcome to the 3rd spot in 10 years on LQN of my Ignore List.

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No. There can be many definitions of community, and I don't need your interpretation of it.

in your vision of this project who will have to check if the updates from the various maintainers pushed to this current-dedicated repository don't conflict with other updates, break stuff or even build at every current update?

I think you are missing the purpose of the official SBo repository: that is not to have the latest software but the versions of it that the maintainers feel more stable or that they feel more confident with (they are meant to be the primary users of the SlackBuild they maintain).
The purpose of my personal (and unofficial) repository is just to patch stuff to build on current, that is what I offer (as a best-effort thing) since 10 years and I started (and I keep doing it) because I use current on a lot of installations and I needed and still need a working repository for that platform.

If you feel like something more could be done maybe the best course of action is doing it, probably if someone agrees with you there will be contributors.
but if I were you I would avoid telling others what to do with their spare time (contributions to open source projects are generally done during that).

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Can't believe I am about write this but I.G.O.R does have a point in this respect. As ponce points out its hard to have a project like slackbuilds work well without somewhat more frequently fixed releases to target.

Obviously only Pat decides when its ready but there have been in IMHO anyway plenty of places along the way with current over the past 3 years or so where current could have easily been Slackware 14.3 if not Slackware 15. Even if it was an "online only release" or something due to issues with the store it certainly would have helped the community.

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I was actually pointing out something else, please re-read what I wrote.

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