I've searched the forums here and with Google a few times and I never really found anything that answered my questions.

Currently I *try* to use swaret to keep my system up to date. Admittedly I don't do it as often as I should, but every time I've used it I'll spend 20-30 minutes downloading and installing the updates .. and then the next 4-5 hours trying to get my system working again like it was before. I know there are logs and such that all the guides and posts I've found say to check, but I haven't been able to find them and/or I don't know what to do when/if I find them.

So I guess my questions are:
-- Is there a guide/tutorial somewhere that walks you through the updating process in excrutiating detail?
-- Is swaret the best utility to use to update?
-- Is there any way to "undo" the things I do with swaret?

Along the same lines:
-- How do I restore packages I've removed with the pkgtool? I try to use pkgtool to restore them but nothing happens.

I feel like I'm making a lot of progress with Linux/Slack, but this is still one of the things that I'm still completely lost on and it seems like the more reading I do the more confused I get. -->

to restore a package, download the original package and use upgradepkg.

If you ask me, don't use any automated tool. Read the Changelog, pick a local mirror and download the updated packages.
I never broke my slack this way. Also, there is an UPGRADE.TXT file in every mirror, but its for upgrating 10.1 to 10.2 but some hints are usefull in the slackware-current update process too.

I prefer using installpkg,removepkg and upgradepkg instead of pkgtool. Actually I think this is what pkgtool uses.

It does. pkgtool is just a nifty GUI for them

Does that work with things I can only download as RPMs or have to (try anyway) to compile from source?

No. It works with tgz packages that have been built for Slack. Compiling is only, usually, required for applications where there are no Slack packages available, or you want to use different options that the packages.

Cheers,
Eddie

I've tried quite a lot of different approaches to this problem.

I found that swaret is somewhat mediocre. It breaks a lot of things on you system, and it's far from reliable. The same applies to slapt-get, but to lesser extent it seems.

I've tried using NetBSD pkgsrc (the ports system from NetBSD). It took a couple of hours of hacking, but eventually it'd work. It works real well, but the X11-port seemed to have a nasty bug that would prevent xcursor, mplayer and lots of other stuff from building.

Later on i tried Crux ports (theres even a CruxPorts4Slack project: http://www.delilinux.de/cruxports4slack.html ), and to say the least: it WORKS and it works _well_. It somehow like Gentoo's portage, but it's a lot faster and gives you more control. Crux ports doesn't check dependencies, but gives you good control, by letting you control exactly what the thing that you're building should support and what it shouldn't. Also, crux ports is capable of checking for updates with ports -d and that seems to work _really_ well too.

So for the time being i use crux ports which lets me build thousands and thousands of applications and gives me total control. For things like Gnome which would take too long to build i generally install .tgz's manually.

Kind regards Bjerrk

I'm happy with slackpkg -- it only updates from the official mirrors, but I can live with that; LinuxPackages.net has most of anything else I need, and we Slackers are no strangers to manually installing, so it all works out.