This discussion Caused me a write up because. I was pissed that stuff broke for no reason.

Upgrade from 4.4.157 to 4.4.172. now nothing builds none of the Virtual box stuff. none of the Nvidia drivers till Nvidia turned the warning off.

It was a Slackpkg pkgtool issue.
The reason why Pat could not see the problem is because he uses fresh system upgrade to another.
And as we all see now the way Pat is building the kernel in current will fix this issue.

pkgtool is leaving old files.
So after testing the issue over and over. and was able to repeat the issue.
Upgrading from 4.4.157 to 4.4.172 left old headers and you never know because pkgtool did it's job did not delete them installing new ones or over write them. It is a pkgtool issue.

Do you have more information on this? Because by design, there should be no leftover files unless they were renamed in the doinst.sh or they belong to multiple packages (or it was generated after the package was created).

I was under the impression the issue was due to the kernel developers changing ABI on an LTS kernel due to some issue, but I can't remember what it is.

I haven't run a 4.4.x kernel on my 14.2 system for like 2 years, so I can't comment on this specific issue, but I've never seen a problem with upgrading packages unless it was one of the two instances I mention above.

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Bassmadrigal is correct, this problem is due to a kernel ABI change with 4.4.172.
There are many threads already here about this particular issue.
I haven't had any issues since nVidia updated their drivers to work with newer 4.4.x kernels.
Since I don't use VirtualBox, I don't know if they ever fixed their kernel drivers.

Hi bassmadrigal yes some of the headers stayed the same. did not change.
When I built it and did a make install_headers that
fixed the problem so the headers package seems to be the issue.

The other way I tested it was to actual rm -rf /usr/include/linux
Then upgrade to the new kernels and header package.
and all problems fixed.
So that pointed me to headers package not deleting some of headers.
Do not know the exact ones you can do it.
Found my fix.
Glad you had know problems all my fresh install on on Vbox had the same issues.
for building guest additions.
and both pc I have with slackware 14.2 I can reproduce it.
with the older Nvidia drivers and VBox
I am glad you had no issues.
But like I said I can reproduce this issue over and over.

If you can produce it over and over, can you provide some of the files that were not deleted by removepkg/upgradepkg (instead of deleting /usr/include/linux/, move it somewhere else and then run make install_headers and compare the difference between the directories)? This is the first I've ever heard of this issue and looking through the code of removepkg, I don't understand how it could happen.

As much as I'm getting tired of hearing these complaints, the kernel maintainers breaking ABI from *patchlevel* releases is pretty lame.