I just installed slackware and was using Swaret to update some packages. I tried to get a newer version of Mozilla and Swaret returned that my 1.4 version was up to date. Mozilla has 1.6 and 1.7beta on their site. How good is Swaret about maintaining up-to-date stuff?

Did you edit your swaret.conf? You have to set it to update to -current to get the latest packages, and Mozilla 1.6 is part of -current at the moment. Are you using an up to date mirror? Swaret normally works great for me, I just upgraded everything to current yesterday and things are working fine.

Swaret is very good at maintaining "up-to-date stuff". BUT, Swaret can only update what it finds having a new/updated version in the repositories tou assign in the swaret.confg file.

Mozilla's newer version , so far, are not kept in the repositories (I do not know why). You have to download it and install it yourself.

HTH
Regards...

Mozilla-1.6 is in current - xap
Have you got the latest version of swaret (1.6.2-1)
Earlier versions are broken by a change in file format on the servers.
1.7b is more likely to appear in linuxpackages.

I have edited the swaret.conf file. I'm looking at it again now, and the only thing I see to set to "current" is the version of slackware. I have it set to 9.1 now. Is this what you are saying to change to "current" to get the latest package versions? I see nothing else about updating to current. I'm not sure about upgrading to slackware current due to concerns about stability. Isn't 9.1 the latest non-beta release?
Also, I am running 1.6.2, not 1.6.2-1. I have done the "slocate and update" command for swaret and this is what I have.

su
slocate -u -e /mnt &
swaret --update
swaret --check

=> Checking for new swaret Version... DONE!

swaret is up-to-date!


Is there something I need to do to get a later version?


I don't know how to see if the download mirrors are up-to-date. In my conf file, there are about a dozen listed, half of which are commented out, and they are listed as follow:

ROOT=http://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/slackware/slackware-$VERSION

with version being set previously to 9.1.


If I do need to set version to "current", no problem, but I don't know why this would be necessarey to get a latest version of Mozilla, for example.

Of course it's not necessary, since you can update whatever you like manually. Want the latest Mozilla? Just download and upgradepkg. Want the latest xchat? Go on. Etc. Swaret is just a tool for automating and maintaining on a bit larger scale...like, an entire system, for instance. Another very good feature of swaret is its ability to check dependencies, so one might want to use swaret even to get certain individual packages. The man page as well as the FAQ on their site should leave no questions unanswered.

You're right about the -current branch and the stability aspect; -current is sort of "slackware in the making", what's eventually going to become the next release. Hence, the packages in current are possibly not as well tested as those in the stable branches. However, I'm running a completely -current system and have yet to experience a problem, so you don't necessarily have to consider the -current branch as a mine field inhabited by radioactive, man-eating zombies playing Britney Spears on maximum volume 24/7.

Yes, you do need to set it to current. Setting it to 9.1 will only install the packages up to the 9.1 release (which you already have) - to get the latest packages you have to set it to current. Setting the version to 9.1 would be for upgrading older versions of slack to the 9.1 release. Only adjust the version variable at the top of the file. If you don't want to upgrade everything up to current, then just upgrade the mozilla package by hand - it's in the package database at slackware.com. There are really no stability issues I've seen in current, and it fixes a lot of security wholes (especially if you're using it as a server, eg. apache 1.2.9) - plus the latest versions of things are sometimes marginally faster.

btw with swaret, you run swaret --update to get an up to date package list from your mirror of choice, and then swaret --upgrade to actually download and install all the packages (or swaret --upgrade -a to do it automatically without any prompting from you) - you need to man swaret and read the documentation on the swaret site.

The only thing that doesn't work for me at the moment in -current is the gtk-theme-engine pixmap engine, because it is still 2.2 and gtk2 has just been released as 2.4 - the solution is to manually downgrade gtk2 to 2.2 until the 2.4 theme engines package is released.

Note: And it will install any package in the 9.1 tree which is an updated version. There are quite a few.