I noticed that slapt-get excludes a lot of package titles based on aaa, glibc, and kernel.

I've been wondering why, and haven't been able to find any definitive answers... Anyone here have any ideas on why that is? My Slackware installation is currently kernel 2.6.29.6 (I think) and the newest available on the official repositories is 2.6.32.5 (or something like that).

When I put in slapt-get --upgrade it spits out about 15 packages that are excluded that it won't upgrade. Now, I know I can remove the exclusions by editing the slapt-get configuration file, but I don't want to if it's going to screw something up. So my question is:

Is there a reason those are excluded? Is it unsafe to upgrade the kernel with slapt-get?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

If you want to upgrade your kernel, glibc and the likes, use slackpkg. It provides you with all the official updates found in the Slackware ChangeLog. You can also be quite sure that nothing will go wrong.

-A

I'd rephrase it: It's less likely that something goes wrong
I tried it twice and each time it left me with either unbootable system or it didn't load the modules.
(but it might have been just my lack of luck/experience)

Probably for that reason /etc/slackpkg/blacklist says:

Can't remember having to remove blacklisted kernel packages, and yet I can download all of them.. (Maybe I've just avoided any problems by using my own compiled kernels ). The only ever problem I've had with slackpkg updates was with the shared-mime-info package, which sent all my LXDE desktop icons into limbo.

-A

No kidding. I blacklisted anything kernel related in slackpkg. When I want to upgrade or change my kernel, I just compile my own. I let slackpkg handle upgrading almost everything else. Works like a charm that way.

Because they are packages that can potentially break your system. For example aaa_base should never be upgraded. And you could easily miss a kernel upgrade if it was possible to upgrade using just slapt-get --upgrade. Which would mean that you probably didn't run lilo after upgrading the kernel, which would in turn mean that your system would not boot the next time. By putting them in the EXCLUDE list, slapt-get forces the user to make a conscious choice if he wants to upgrade these critical packages. If the user really wants to do the upgrade he can still use slapt-get to upgrade. Specifying the packages to upgrade explicitly with -i will always work, even if they are in the EXCLUDE list. For example:
will upgrade the kernel-huge package anyway.

And using slapt-get is of course just as safe as using slackpkg.

Slapt-get always prefers the package with the higher version.
(Also, it's sometimes wrong about which version of a package is newer,
and this isn't the desired behavior anyway.)

Slackpkg doesn't care which package has a higher version,
it always prefers the version present on the Slackware mirror.

Slackpkg is the safer choice.

Well, reading another thread on here, sounds like I won't want to upgrade the kernel anyway as the new kernel appears to have removed IDE support... My motherboard currently does not have SATA :P

But that's for the information...