Thanks kjh,

Admittedly, 14.2 is pretty old now so it's trending towards worst case scenario, but I think that demonstrates the downside of a patches/ directory quite well.

Anyway, I'm laboring the point now, so I'll shut up.

It could also be enough to just have a "backup/" or "revert/" directory where replaced packages (one version of a given package max) would be sent. In that way a revert would always be possible but moreover you could get the latest working patch, not a sometimes very old package upgraded several times since then.

(Of course, dura lex sed lex, we discuss then Pat decides alone what is worth implementing.)

Maybe. But how old does a release have to be, to be a worst case scenario? Many times prior releases get patches for years, longer than 14.2 has been around.

Just as a side, I use my own package tracking scripts. Usually when an update comes, regardless if it is in patches/ or slackware/<pkg set>, I create an old/ directory and save the prior version. It's very handy when it comes to the eventual revert as I've restored a backup in a -current installation. Pat does it his own way, which kind of makes sense. I can't imagine how much disk space and time he eats up prepping, staging, testing, and releasing, across all supportd versions. Whether that means he backs-up incrementally or not or retests everything for a small release, I guess it's still nice to be able to restore to the fully tested release if something goes wrong, and otherwise hope for the best.