I upgraded to current yesterday

My apologies in advance if the answer is obvious but I have a question about one instruction.

I used Alien Bob's rsync_current.sh script to create a local mirror and upgraded my system using Pat's instructions in UPGRADE.TXT with a few modifications such as which packages to remove, etc.

From /slackware/slackware64-current/UPGRADE.TXT:

I understand why we upgrade glibc first, but...

is the reason we update the package tools and related tools before the rest of the system, rather than with the rest of the system, because we want to use the new package tools as soon as possible? Because of security updates, etc? Is there a different reason, or more reasons?

Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Yes

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Or you can grab Alien Bob's liveslak. That's what I did, but I was working with a brand-new drive.

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There's also an ISO for Slackware64-current.

http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sla...4-current-iso/

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Hello,

I am not running Slackware-current but my assumption is that the package management system has had major changes that have to be applied first so that they be fully effective before installing other packages. This includes the migration of the package database and directories from /var/log to /var/lib/pkgtools. If I am wrong, please someone correct me.

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And the usage of the newest tar version instead of the 1.13 release that was used by the older pkgtools package:This was changed early in the pkgtools-15.0 series of updates.

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@garpu @hitest

For my first upgrade I wanted to try the manual method. I enjoyed it so I'm going to stick with it. But thank you for your recommendations. It's much appreciated

That makes sense. Thank you

Great. Thank you

I know I'm late to this, but there can be many reasons to upgrade the package tools before the rest of the system. Didier and ehartman have covered some of the recent reasons, but another major one happened quite a few years back when Pat added support for multiple compression options for packages and started compressing his packages using xz.

If you had simply upgraded the whole distro at once, you would not have had support for the new .txz packages that Pat had in the repo.

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In fact the gzip package in 13.0 (64bit) was one of the few packages left in .tgz form too, so that you could unpack the distributed pkgtools:
The xz package itself was still the 12.x one so with the new pkgtools you could then unpack all of the new .txz archives

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