Hi,

Apparently you don't understand the Slackware way or mindset. I participate primarily to give back to the Slackware community, my venue just happens too be the LQ Slackware forum among others.

'newbie' is actually a poor term. No person should be labeled but tagging does give us a way to identify skills. I guess that my age should tag me as a oldie but goodie.

pixellany,

Dependency resolution is highly overrated. Dependency resolution is a fine thing *if* it reliably works. I much prefer the Slackware way of doing things. In 30 minutes I can have a working system installed, up and running ( all dependencies met). If I want to install third party applications, the dependencies are clearly listed at SBo. Everything works properly. The first time. I like to be in complete control of my system. Slackware gives me that control over system administration. It is not inconvenient for me to manage my own dependency issues. I prefer it. Each to his own, pixellany.

respectfully submitted,

hitest

Member titles, posts counts etc. are all just superficial nonsense. I seriously doubt they'd act as any sort of 'lock-in'.

Besides, a new forum might offer to give us all titles of "Gods of the known Universe" to entice us over, and Guru pales beside that!

But there isn't a new forum, so this is all just silly talk.


@sakho,
The Association of Ontario Land Surveyors (AOLS) talk about Slackware?
Cool!

Been around 12 years or so since I posted/read anything on usenet. I stopped when it started to degenerate. It's hard to say this without sounding elitist, but the Internet was much better when it was hard to access and only the people who really wanted to be here were doing online communications stuff. I miss dial-up BBSes and zone mail hour.

I don't know but suspect that having all packages loaded with admin privileges is a security risk. Though this might be more of an issue with the slackbuilds.

No, you're right it's a valid concern. Which it's why it's important to check the gpg signature files before you install the official packages and in the case of slackbuilds or other 3rd party packages make sure you trust the person providing them and for that matter the source they're built from.

Unfortunately, it's not something that can be easily avoided.

I wouldn't 'mind' having more transparency in the development cycle. It may be pointless since such a small team, but I'd still be reading over any dev mailing list It may help the team get more contribution from it's users. It could also just piss them off more.

If there is such a thing, and I've just been missing out over the last 5~ yrs of using slackware, I'll be bitter...

I have no problem with PV, Eric, Robby, and the members of the Slackware team being solely responsible for the development of Slackware.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I trust the Slackware team.
Also, if there are any problems in -current they are reported to the lead developers and the issues are quickly resolved.

You are not required to read ANY of my posts!!! But, if you actually did, you would see that I often say GOOD things about Slackware....

Your issue is with the person that started this thread.....I'll make you a deal: Start one on what you don't like about Arch---I promise to answer......

Of course it is a Slackware approach--SW is os one of the majority of distros that does a complete install, but the SW community also is big on customizing and optimizing. My only point is that I prefer to optimize by adding things, not by removing them. Maybe that means I should really be using LFS.

"moderator troll"----I like it--please ask Jeremy to add that to the list of available titles. But does one attain this before or after--eg--"guru" or "moderator"?

It's not that I do not trust them. If I didn't, I wouldn't use slackware. It's more of a curiosity thing.

OTOH, the 'surprise' of 64bit was kinda cool.

I have been using SuSE for many years, that comes with Postfix. It's an excellent MTA, and in my early days with Linux it was a real relief, as it was much easier to set up than Sendmail.

But in recent versions I found that the configuration of Sendmail has benn greatly simplified. I can set it up now by modifying the M4 scripts (well, that's something the value of which could seriously be discussed...) just a fast as I can enter the configuration details into YaST for Postfix on SuSE.

Plus: Sendmail is currently faster than Postfix in my environment (not a lot, both are capable of transferring tons of messages in a short period of time), and it can, surprisingly, extended with external modules, a bit easier than Postfix.

Also, I somehow like the "Bat Book", and as Slackware is the oldest distro in service, it somehow fits that it comes with the "original" mailer.
That's, as long as it is competitive. Some years ago, it was not, and if Slackware had switched to Postfix, QMail (well, Bernstein is a bit of a character, it seems...) or some other good mailer, it would have well been justified.

But in recent years there seem to have been a few more security problems in Postfix than in Sendmail. No one would have expected this five years ago, when Sendmail was the Swiss Cheese of MTAs.

gargamel

Agreed. That was very cool indeed!

I don't like that quality, useful programs don't respect Slackware and insist on using gnome libraries to compile. e.g. gnucash and inkscape.

All the gnome libs are so interconnected you have to be extremely careful that you get the proper version that is designed to work with the GTK and other very few packages that slackware installs from gnome.

One sad thing being the transition of programs forcing the requirement libgsf-gnome which is a subset of libgsf installed with Slackware. Hopefully the libgsf maintainers realize this and separate the package.

I suppose that's more of a complaint about other programs in relation to Slackware... Maybe what Slackware is missing, is a good method to auto recompile all the packages (minus tool chain) specific to your processor. But it's arguable that the potential loss in stability and quality is not worth the potential speed increase.

Oh! I know. autofs doesn't come with an rc script designed for Slackware. That's annoying.

Doing my own dependency checking was something I was intimidated by before I switched to Slackware. Since then I've started to wonder what the big deal is. I find it much easier to control and understand my system when I do all that myself.

I'll agree with this. I prefer starting with a blank slate and adding what I need.

This is everything i do not like about Slackware...

Its empty... meaning there is nothing that i dislike...

IMHO there are three distros i may consider "sane" :

Slackware, Arch and Crux...

In growing required skill to master them...

Being a Slacker, I may "try" to be an Archer... but being a Cruxer is way beyond my level of expertise yet...

... maybe when I become an Archer I can dare to tinker with Crux...

BRGDS

Alex