Hey all, I was just wondering why there hasn't been any changes to The Current Tree of Slackware? Is patrik and the guys taking it off for awhile or something?
Sorry if this is a repeat of a question that's been asked alot...

the "new" has not worn off slackware-12

give the old man time...

hey you kids get off my lawn...

Hmm... ok, I just wasn't sure if something crazy was going on or something.
Thanks

Patrick works very hard to provide us with the best OS on the planet. I think the man has earned some down time to have a few beers and relax:-)

I would assume there is going to be a considerable downtime after the labor that Slackware 12 was. Both because Pat needs the break, and also because there really isn't anything major on the horizon to keep -current busy.

With Slackware 12 we are pretty much up to date with the rest of the distributions (kernel 2.6, HAL, udev, D-Bus, Compiz, etc, etc), or at least as much at Pat is willing to go (I.E. no PAM). The main thing now is just keeping updated on software releases, which is not so much of a big deal that Pat needs to branch into the -current tree to test, at least, not yet.

Also bear in mind that not all work is always shown in -current. Occasionally Pat works months behind the scenes before he updates -current with what he has been doing. Even though -current is the testing fork of Slackware, there is still a minimum level of functionality and completion that has to be attained before it is made publicly available.

Maybe he's waiting to unleash something new and exciting that Slackware has never seen before!? Although this seems unlikely cuz Slackware isn't a bells and whistles kind of distro (thats a good thing).

The only huge thing I can think of right now is KDE 4.0, and even there, I would be surprised if PV would go for the first release. He will probably wait a bit. Still, probably quite a lot of work there (QT4, CMake build system for KDE, etc.) so maybe he'll start it sooner than later.
Otherwise, as pointed out, Slack 12.0 is pretty up to date.
Another possibility is an official 64-bits port, which could be the right time since the period seems calm. I would really appreciate that personaly.

get your updates from the 12.0 tree until you see activity in current again

tobyl

why wouldnt the same security patches get placed into current as well as 12? i'm not 100% sure but i thought that was they way it has always been and that current would be updated more often than 12 (stable), but i could be wrong.

That is how it works when -current is active, security updates will be applied to both the stable releases and the -current tree at the same time.

But since nobody is actually using -current right now (since it is just Slackware 12) there is no reason to release specific security updates for it.

Once -current starts moving and people are actually using it, then the security updates and that sort of thing will come as well.

No. Slackware -current is for *development* leading to the next stable release.
It would not make any sense to spend time building security updates for it right now; why would Pat waste time building -current packages before getting the core infrastructure upgraded? Think back to the first public views of -current after 11.0 -- glibc, gcc, and many other core packages were upgraded. Until those types of upgrades are done, time spent building anything else is just wasted.

As someone else already stated, use 12.0 + patches right now.

Last time It only took him a month to get working on current. This time it's already at the 2 month mark.

As I understand it Slackware 12.0 was a significant milestone where Patrick had to upgrade the tool chain.
Patrick will get to it:-)

Um, not really.

After 11.0 released on October 2nd, 2006, there was no public -current development until March 17th, 2007. There was indeed a lot of development going on in -current, but other than the Slackware team members, nobody knew that for certain until March 17th, 2007. As further proof, see the ChangeLog.txt entry from that date (St. Patrick's Day) :-)

I assume he means any activity, not just a large change. Security updates and patches were released for -current the same month that Slackware 11 was released, and Pat had posed the 2.4/2.6 question in the changelog as of Nov 9th.

It was quite some time before the public got to see the big changes, but there was at least some changes made public. I guess that is the core complaint some people are having, that there hasn't even been a minor update to -current let alone a large change.

Though personally, I don't see what the rush is. It isn't like there has ever been a definite development/release schedule for Slackware, it happens when it happens.