Now I have a new installation of 10.2 I would like to keep it up to date by keeping an eye on the changelog ( I am wary of using swaret )

The packages listed are:

openssl-0.9.7g-i486-2.tgz
xine-lib-1.03a-i686-1.tgz
thunderbird-1.0.7-686-1.tgz

Do I just run installpkg or do I run upgradepkg?
If I run upgradepkg do I have to find out the name of the old package?

Thanks,

Alan

Use upgradepkg.
Upgradepkg will find the old package, install the newer version of the same package then and remove all the stuff from the old package that is no longer needed.
Upgradepkg will warn you in case it does not find a previous version of the package to be installed. You can read man upgradepkg to learn about the parameters that you can pass to upgradepkg.

Especially, read the last part of that man page (strangely enough called the BUGS section) that talks about how to handle configuration files that a package might use when you upgrade.

Eric

I recently wrote a tool to help keeping up with slackware updates without slapt-get or swaret. It's actually a fairly simple frontend for wget with ability to compare versions of installed packages to the versions of the packages on the server and download newer versions is desired. It can also be used to find out what package (or which packages) contain certain files. Comes in handy if you have problems with missing libs or such. You can get it here: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~psulasal/scripts/fetchpkg

Place it in for example /usr/local/bin and give it execute rights (chmod a+x fetchpkg). fetchpkg -help will give you some information on how to use it. Fetchpkg will need MIRROR environment variable set pointing to the desired slackware mirror (using alternative sources like linuxpackages is also possible). Here is a script that you can place in /etc/profile.d for that purpose: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~psulasal...ts/fetchpkg.sh (also remember to make it executable as well).

With fetchpkg.sh in /etc/profile.d, you can use the variables defined in it (edit them as needed) to control the MIRROR variable (i.e. MIRROR=$LINUXPACKAGES would use the linuxpackages mirror and MIRROR=$OFFICIAL would use the official slackware mirror).

The script doesn't do any installing/upgrading and you can (should?) run it as a regular user (not root). I originally wrote it for myself, but maybe it's useful for someone else also

In addition to the above responses, if you are using KDE then look for a nice utility called kslackcheck. The utility will not update anything, but does nicely help you decide which progs need updating for your particular system. The utility also will download the files for you if you want. You still need to run upgradepkg on your own, which, I prefer anyway.

To upgrade manually do you have to know the exact name of the package that is being upgraded for upgradepkg old%new?

Only if the name of the package has changed as well as version, which has never happened to me. Normally simply upgradepkg [newpackage.tgz] will do.