Under the current conditions in which by military ordinances the freedom of movement is restricted and the company where I have the servers is closed, it is harder to get in front of the console if something goes wrong in the implementation of the PAM. If it were just my personal laptop it wouldn't have been a problem.

Are you running -current in a production environment?

Are the servers shutdown?

glib-2.64.2
https://download.gnome.org/sources/g...-2.64.2.tar.xz

Geez... If this is your worry, you have your priorities wrong! -current should not be used in production servers... you're just asking for something to go wrong. If you are using -current on production servers, you may want to hold off on updating if PAM is pushed out of testing/ (and then you should probably seriously reconsider using a development version of an OS in a production environment).

I still think this option should be changed to USB on the 64-bit iteration - maybe just keep the floppy option for 32-bit.

Why not just leave it as it is for historical purposes ? :)

I can probably see the argument on the 32-bit particularly but seriously what is the point on a 64-bit machine? Yes technically it is not harming anything by it being there, but on the other hand you have a useless option, and even if say one did have a floppy drive - it would be external obviously as no motherboard I know of these days even come with a floppy IDE connection on the board itself, and does a USB floppy drive address itself as fd0?

I have no idea about if the USB floppies address itself by fd0 but surely there is no more floppy connections on the motherboards.
Therefore I agree with you that unless somebody would try to install slackware on an very old machine, the correct would be to at least get an option of editing the correct device, or ammend the text with "install on an external device" or soemthing similar.

But I also know that its mainly a cosmetic problem, probably PAt decides to correct it in the future, who knows.

I'd just checked my AM3 motherboard (with DDR3 memory) and it have a floppy port. Also I am quite sure that my other Intel 1155 motherboard (with DDR3 memory) have one too.

So, according with you, those motherboards of mine are obsolete for today Slackware and they are as good to be dumped to bin?

To make the thing in the context, we are talking about how relevant is to have a floppy option on the installer. So to answer with another question, are you using the floppy on those motherboards ?

If yes, then surely you are one of the few people around with booting slackware from a floppy.

librsvg-2.48.3
https://download.gnome.org/sources/l...-2.48.3.tar.xz

When I built my AM2 machine many, many years ago (I think it was 2008), I had to do some legwork to find one with a floppy port. Many of the boards I looked at lacked that drive and I still wanted to have one included (even though I don't think I used it for anything other than seeing what was on old disks I had laying around). It is very probable that the port was included on various boards since then (and you might even be able to find some modern boards with it), but it certainly isn't standard to include it and I'd imagine 90% of the boards released in the last 10 years lack floppy ports.

But it is also very easy to add a floppy drive to a computer via USB, either using an internal USB header or plugging in an external. But how many people are going to want to boot a modern system off a floppy drive?

I just looked on Amazon and you can get a 10 pack of 1.44MB floppies for $18US. That is $1279/GB. In comparison, you can pick up a 32GB Sandisk USB 2.0 drive for $6.50. That is $0.20/GB. Why anyone would use a floppy for anything beyond supporting extremely old legacy systems or to see what is on a long lost, but recently found disk? There is just no value to use a floppy, especially when you couple cost with the extremely slow transfer rates (USB1.0 is 50x faster than floppy speeds).

If anyone is wanting to boot a modern Slackware off of a floppy drive, it is likely as a fun exercise, not as a necessity. It is very likely that everyone would have a USB drive they could use in place of that. Because of that, I like the idea to change it to an "external device" and then let the person specify the device. If it happens to be a floppy, more power to them.

But then I've never used that functionality of the installer. If I ever need a rescue boot, I just use the Slackware ISO dd'd onto a USB drive and will fix it from there.

gtk+-3.24.18
https://download.gnome.org/sources/g...3.24.18.tar.xz

qpdf-10.0.1:

https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/releases

cups-filters-1.27.4:

http://openprinting.org/download/cup...-1.27.4.tar.xz

Maybe I did something wrong. but xman doesn't work on -current. I get a few entries, but nothing like the full selection of man pages. I think it is the $MANPATH,but trying to set that environment variable gives an error. probably from the oracle jdk package I installed/