So is Swaret a dead package manager for Slackware or what?

Can't even pull up the webpage for Swaret anymore...

Maybe you are looking at an old link. Swaret is over at http://swaret.sourceforge.net and it seems pretty alive to me: latest release is 1.7.0 R4, published 15 Sept 2004.

You may also want to try alternatives to swaret, including slapt-get

There was a bit of controversy a while back about swaret and slapt-get. If you go to the slapt-get freshmeat.net link above, you will see a post from the swaret developer addressing this flamewar.

It's interesting that Patrick V. pulled swaret from the Slackware 10 extras cd, when it was there for 9.1. I wonder if that was in response to the above controversy.

Ah, kewl...it moves under Sourceforge.

thanks

superious, could you please help me understand slapt-get ?

is it similar to swaret where it automatically downloads updates from current, with a single command or something?

xushi: like swaret, you can configure slapt-get to get files from the a Slackware Current mirror, or from linuxpackages.net. The slapt-get author, however, recommends against mixing third-party sources with the official mirrors.

slapt-get also differs from swaret in dependency checking. slapt-get requires specific slapt-get metadata in the package, whereas swaret tries to infer the dependencies from the package contents (I think). My knowledge of this is pretty superficial, so you should read through all of the documentation if you are interested.

I'd thought it was dead cause the official website is down, but the one at sourceforge works, so it's alive and kicking.