if a person said they were having trouble pounding in a nail with a screwdriver, i would suggest they use a hammer.

i use slackware, it's a great distro -- in a lot of ways one of the best if not the best -- but that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every job. imho, it's best as a server, where you can set it up, follow the security advisories, and otherwise basically just leave it alone until you're ready for a complete overhaul in a release or two (or three, etc.). it's not really designed in the same model as a distro that has a "moving target" as current, e.g., debian, arch, etc. to expect that out of slackware is the same thing as expecting the screwdriver to hammer the nail. maybe it can, but there are better tools for the job.

so iow, i'm trying to help him on a deeper level by suggesting that the features he wants are perhaps better found in other distros. if he wants a "bleeding edge" distro that upgrades to current as its model, with a full-featured and easy to use package manager, then that's debian unstable or testing, or arch, gentoo, etc., not slackware. and finally, aside from any security fixes, an end user "upgrading" slack from 10.1 to "current" doesn't really make a whole lot of sense anyway, imho. but to each his or her own.

Well I guess that is what slackware is best for to you. I and many other people on the other hand use slackware for all of it. My servers, My AMD64 desktop with bleeding edge graphics and SATA HDD's and my 2 month old Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop with bleeding edge hardware. I find Slackware is suited for all environments. It suits *me* just fine for everything. But the person who started this thread wasn't asking what slackware is best suited for and what it's not. He only asked a simple question of why swaret was not doing what it should be. He figured it out and is still using slackware. I don't understand why an "end user" wouldn't want to keep current? Current just means the newest program updates and security fixes. Why wouldn't you want those? But hey like you said, if you want alpha software use gentoo or such and such distro.

If he had said "Hey everyone, I hate slackware package management tell me about other pkg managers that might be better for me". Then I would have probably suggested debian myself as well.

well, you answered it in your way, and i answered it in mine. slackware is not the best distro for desktop use when ease of package management and upgrading is required, and that's just a fact. if you want to think it is, have fun with all your "upgrading," it's fine with me, i have better things to do with my time. but there's really no point in saying i answered it "wrong" just because you don't agree with it. a person who asks how to share files with his windows network isn't specifically asking about samba, either, but that's the answer i would give. i gave my opinion to try to help him, and he is free to regard or disregard it as he wants.

all it takes is a quick look at the current change log then download the package with wget or something then upgradepkg <package name here> pretty simple to me, and the pkg tools slackware has have never let me down.

well if you use swaret or slapt-get its even easier. Some of us use slackware for more reasons then just package management. Read any of the threads asking about slackware and mine or anyone elses replies to see why. I won't repeat them because a search would be less redundant and I don't want to retype them all out.

Slackware suits me fine, I've tried gentoo and aint really a fan of portage.

Synaptical, I dont consider I'm using the wrong tool for the job, I've used slackware since 9.1 and upgraded to each release as the iso's came out. Now I've got broadband I wanted to try current. I've no reason to use anything else, I can do everything I want with slackware.

okay. enjoy.

i keep current with slackpkg. it's in the extras, and it's simple to use and it works great. like the others said, tho, read the changelogs so you know what your gonna add. you can edit the slackpkg blacklist to not include anything you don't want, like kernels or alsa-utils, and also you can simply upgrade by package, as well. i upgraded again last night, including kde 3.4.1 (i use flux, but i like to know i have the latest of everything) and all my upgrades have gone flawlessly with slackpkg. just my 2 lil cents here....

You could perhaps consider changing to Minislack. THey have an interesting tool called netpkg for updating.

the only problem with that is, unless you're testing it, that's not really how slackware is designed to be used. otherwise, why are there separate updated packages for each version? e.g.:

why not just put everything in "current" and point everyone there? because that's not the slack model. yes, maybe they are just the same package in a different location, but it still breaks the concept of how slack is designed (and also probably risks breaking your system in some cases with the "mix and match" approach. we see with mozilla, for instance:
there is no jre in the earlier versions, and if you "upgrade" to it while still using 10.x you risk breaking your system. but to each his/her own.