Well, one of the reasons, why Slackware has become my favourite distro is exactly that: It requires less updates, and therefore less maintenance than any other distro I know of. It just saves me time!

That's just one dimension of Slackware stability. Another one is, that the way, the system is maintained has remained essentially the same for years. What I've learned years ago, still helps me to get things done in the latest and greatest incarnation of Slackware.


Slightly OT:
BTW, I just read an interview with Miguel De Icaza, where he said, that the arbirtrary and frequent change of APIs is the main reason, why Linux is still not acknowledged as a major platform for desktops. He is right, but he has learned that only recently, while the Patrick Volkerding and the Slackware crew promoted stability of interfaces for a long, long time...

gargamel

No news is good news. Now who was it that said that...?

Funny that miguel just now reaching that conclusion. At least he's catching on.
Now we have to ask ourselves "Who would want Gnu/Linux to fail as a major desktop platform?"
Nah, they'd never purposefully infiltrate and corrupt a competitor, it'd be unethical.

What? Microsoft's APIs are extremely unstable. They break backwards compatibility every few years.

(Which is sometimes required to improve an API, of course).

As long as Pat keeps on top of security updates, all's fine with me.

I agree, which is why I'm getting a little grumpy.

Seamonkey hasn't been updated for Slackware 13.1 in a few months. It's now pretty far behind on security updates. I think the reason is that a newer version of Cairo and something else than what is in Slackware 13.1 is required.

Seamonkey also hasn't been updated for Slackware 13.37 recently, although it is several updates ahead of the version on 13.1. I just tried to build it with the 13.37 SlackBuild script and the newer source code, but it failed during make.

Similarly, we seem to be behind on Thunderbird and Firefox, but there are other threads devoted to those.

I am beginning to wonder if the Slackware team can keep up with the changes to Mozilla applications. They seem particularly hard to build and the get updated very frequently.

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Keep the faith, man! I have no problem at all with Mr. Volkerding and the Core Team taking the needed time to get it right.
Be patient.

May be it's because Pat is hunting a rabbit.

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noticed today, while my rsync script was syncing 64-current with slackware.org.uk, it deleted all the content of slackware64/kde. Not sure, which server is updated first, but could be that big update is coming still today?!

PS ftp.slackware.com appears to still have kde 4.5.5 in slackware64 dir.

Big updates are usually pushed into a hidden directory then mv'd over once everything is uploaded.

The hidden directories weren't always invisible, I even spotted a complete release once and grabbed the release notes and posted them on aols

Security support for Slackware is somewhat lacking if you compare it to some other big distributions, which can afford a big army of backporters and auditors.

Slackware inc. does not often backport the security fixes. Often, security updates will only be included if upstream provides the security fix (usually a new version for the app), Patrick finds the fix not too disruptive and if the fix does compile and work properly under that version of Slackware. If the fix fails to do any of these three points, you won't have the fix for your version. If the new Firefox fails to compile in an old Slackware, it won't be included at all.

From another thread, I got this:

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Probably it is just some technical issue with rsync server on the slackware.org.uk.

I share your uneasiness when it comes to Browser updates. For most of us they're the largest attack-surface we present to the outside world and IMO are the one thing you definitely can't be behind on. Pat can take as long as he likes with Current, but when I see browser updates lagging in stable I worry.

I switched to Opera for mail+browsing, and though it wasn't the reason for switching, being able to keep up with new releases without having to wait for Pat to get around to it or to attempt a long-winded mozilla build from source myself was something that was certainly not lost on me.

Whilst I probably shouldn't bother mentioning this (given I am an Opera employee :P ), Salix seems to do a pretty good job of updating their Firefox package very shortly after each release and their packages are Slackware compatible.

For example, you can get a binary of Firefox 7.0 in Slackware package format here:

mozilla-firefox-7.0.1-i686-1gv.txz
mozilla-firefox-7.0.1-x86_64-1gv.txz

@Gazl: Regarding Opera, beside the Opera.SlackBuild from SlackBuilds.org (which is perfectly repackaged IMHO), Salix also has binary Opera packages (I actually look after these for them). And if you want to test our development releases I provide repackaged binaries here. The nice thing about these development packages is that they will install alongside Opera stable, using their own profile, so you can run both side by side.

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