Thanks for your reply, Patrick.

Well, the interpreter itself has the lifecycle disclosed here. 7.4 has 9 months left of active support and 1 yr and 9 months of security patches. On the other hand, php8 has 1y9m of active, 2y9m of security patches ahead.

All major php frameworks (i.e. WordPress >5.6, Drupal >9.1, Laravel >6 and many others) are already compatible with php8. Most of the legacy code requiring php5.6 will not run on php7.4 anyway. IMHO, and speaking as a PHP developer myself working with both up to date frameworks and legacy code, I see php8 landing in Slackware as a good thing.

If you want to be on the safe side, maybe you can add php8 as the default one and php7.4 in extras or testing, or the other way around. I don't know how much overhead this poses to you, but it looks like quite a safe upgrade path to me. If this is much work, I do not oppose to php8 landing now to replace 7.4 altogheter, as I already have the need to manage all the way down to php5.6 so legacy code can run.

Yes, my most recent apps may require some coding so they can run on php8, but this is really a minor effort to a much brighter, longer and supported future. I for one support this move.

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Wondering if the 'store' will have DVD's available.
Does the store even exist anymore?
I have a collection of the DVD's from version 7 forward still in the original shrink wrap would like to keep it moving forward.
Probably worth a 'lot-o-money' some day. LOL
john

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I don't think so. Most if not all of us cancelled our Slackware subscriptions after we learned about how badly Patrick was being ripped off by the store.
I will continue to make an annual donation to Patrick. We're now at Alpha status I suspect a beta release is coming.

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I'll take Slackware 15.0 alpha over any other distro! Thanks PV & team for moving us all forward.

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Whoa, what a massive update. Updating my Current VM running on a 4-core system with spinners took almost two hours.

Part of me is not looking forward to updating all systems in the house. So many changes since 14.2. Thankfully I have test systems.

Thanks Pat and team for all the hard work. I know this release has been a challenge. Always fun to watch skilled masters at their trade!

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Just finished updating my main driver. It was a breeze!

That move from Mon Feb 8 05:13:26 UTC 2021 changelog (glibc-solibs > aaa_glibc-solibs and aaa_elflibs > aaa_libraries) proved to be a very smart one. Those rare glibc-solibs glitches when such a massive upgrade occurs now belongs to past.

I would like to thanks PV, all the dev team and their supporters over the years for making Slackware my fist OS choice for more than 25 years. Let other 25 years comes ahead as stable and free as it was until now!

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Thanks PV and team . Just putting the finishing touches on the update to 15.0 alpha 1 and so far so good; I did not fall in a hole this time with the glibc updates! 15.0 is indeed going to be an incredible release...

I was also waiting for long time.

Thanks PV.

time to fire up the VM and start preparing an update of my SlackBuilds for 15.0, I guess...

Not all applications are ready for migration to PHP 8!
Eventually PHP 8 in /testing.

As I was logging in to the forum, I noted that my cron job was running, starts at 16:00, it already finished! Wow, was not expecting that. Next step log on a do the deed. Eggcited for sure.

Hmmm since Slackware Current (testing release) is more stable than most distro's "rock solid stable" as well as newer and generally faster. Why would I care that Alpha could take months to go Beta and more to go Full Release? Whether you update daily or run Current as a snapshot, Current is awesome! Alpha is just Mo Betta. We rollin'.

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Some people said some time ago that Slackware Current is not for production!

Yes and someone else noted "Software is either beta or obsolete... or both"

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I thought of a scene from Tomb Raider, as releasing a distro version has a lot to do with planetary alignment (planets = the major upstream software projects)

edit: and yes, sometimes it takes years for an alignment to happen xD