Hi;

Patrick says that upgrade glibc-solibs package before other packages. I did not notice this warning and upgraded all packages to current, then installed new packages including "kde-compat" packages and cleaned old ones. Now it seems to be everything OK with KDE 4.2.1 and other programs.

Does anyone know that why Patrick pointed out to install glibc-solibs package first? What problems can I experince?

Almost every program in Slackware is linked to glibc. If you don't upgrade glibc-solibs first there is a better
than average chance you will render your system completely unusable. And you will need to do something like the
steps listed here. http://rlworkman.net/howtos/glibc-recovery

This means "pkgtool" also uses this package. While installing new packages for current, does pkgtool need upgraded glibc-solibs?
I have upgraded my slack box (v12.2) to current using slackpkg from binary packages not source. For my method does it matter whether upgrading glibc-solibs first or not?

Running programs will not be replaced by remove / copy operations. See unlink(2).

except that upgradepkg etc. are just shell scripts and it's the utilities it will try and run later (which won't be loaded) that will hit problems with library incompatibility.

This incompatibility could happen either way around, though library developers try and keep things backwards compatible wherever possible.

Because of this, it's much more likely for a library to be backward compatible than for a program linked against the old library to be forward compatible with the new library which is why I believe Pat recommends to update the libs first.

Having said that, if you did it in the wrong order, but got away with it, then I don't think you'll need to take any remedial action. You just got lucky.


Personally, I always use the ROOT= and install into a fresh parallel filesystem to avoid these sort of issues when doing these mass updates, which also has the advantage of leaving you with a nice easy backout plan. It means you have to reapply any of your customisations to the new enviroment, but there are ways to make that fairly painless.

phys,

check out the upgrade HowTos in my signature. While they are not specifically for this -current, the HowTos show how to do a proper upgrade using slackpkg along with the official Slackware documentation.