Hi folks,

So, I see from the changelogs that Slackware Current is now being updated regularly.

I've currently got a Slackware 12.0 on my home desktop. I'm considering upgrading my system to Slackware-Current very soon.

I'm pretty comfortable using slackpkg to automatically upgrade my system based on Slackware-Stable - I did that regularly with both Slack 10 & 11. I have already upgraded my system to Slackware Stable (12.0).

However, I remember reading in several posts on this forum that one shouldn't blindly use slackpkg to upgrade to Slackware-Current, just because there could be 'gotchas'. I think these warnings were mostly for using slackpkg to upgrade to a new version of Slackware (i.e. from 10 to 11, for example), but I am thinking there could be other issues in doing this as well.

I've reviewed the changelogs, I can see there's a lot of upgrades & patches under the Current branch - I don't think there's anything in particular that would appear to need "special attention". I think it might be OK to upgrade to Current using slackpkg, but I'm not 100% sure, which is why I'm here.

So, my questions are:

1) Do you think I can safely upgrade to Slackware-Current using slackpkg, based on what was written in the Slackware-Current changelog between 2007/07/01 and 2007/10/17?

2) If #1 is not a good option, what is the best way for upgrading to Slackware-Current without manually downloading individual files and upgrading/patching them, one at a time?

Cheers,
Bob

AFAIK, Slack-current is the development tree. So, it is meant for development, not for production. You can choose to sync with Slack-current, but there will be chances where you need to fix it yourself (can be tricky if you are running a production server).

Indeed.

A common mistake is to think that "slackware-current" means "the current version of Slackware Linux".
Slackware-current is the development tree - although this version of Slackware is usually quite stable there is no guarantee that it will work after every update. In fact, you should expect to need some manual tweaking of your system from time to time, and you are _expected_ to be knowledgeable enough to be able to fix a broken system or else to write a well-documented bug report for the Slackware team. Do not send this to info@slackware.com as these emails will silently disappear into the bit bucket.
I would advise to use the ##slackware IRC channel on Freenode, or the #slackware channel on OFTC, to ask for advise on possible bugs before sending reports to Pat Volkerding.

If you just want to run a stable supported version of Slackware, stick to the most recent release of Slackware-stable. At this time that is Slackware 12.0. Patches to stable releases are made available regularly, and these are communicated on the slackware-security and/or slackware-announce mailing lists (please subscribe! See http://slackware.com/lists/). The ChangeLog for the patches to Slackware 12.0 (post-release) is here: ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar.../ChangeLog.txt

Using automatic package managers like slaptget, swaret, slackpkg is strongly discouraged when you run slackware-current. Instead, it is wise to follow the activity on the slackware-current ChangeLog.txt to determine what has changed, and keep a fixed eye on the CHANGES_AND_HINTS file which documents the updated/deleted/added packages and changed behaviour in great detail.

Using these package managers to keep a stable release of Slackware up to date, should be safe enough, as long as you read the messages these programs spit out when they run.

Eric

Thanks very much to both of you who replied. Your explanations described all I needed to know!

Based on your advice, I think I'll stick with the stable version.

Bob

Precisely because managing a slackware-current system is a bit tricky I created slackroll. If you reconsider using -current give it a try. I'm using it to upgrade to -current right now and it's been working very fine. It's more or less balanced between a fully automated tool and common sense, so it basically informs you of the activity you need to know about, and gives you commands to proceed in the upgrade without having to do the process manually. There is also a tutorial. It immediately showed the missing kdebindings and poppler-data packages, and it was me who sent a bug report to Volkerding, so it's a recent good detail to brag about.

Just upgraded to slackware-current, using slackroll, following the basic instructions, and it worked very well.
I did have some troubles with slackware after upgrading, but that is normal for the adventurous who dare to use -current :-)

I've been doing the 'always stay -current' approach since about mid-time 9.1
Never had a problem which made me having to revert to a previous version. Small errors of course occur, but otherwise it's "verynice" [(c) Borat]

How is slackroll different from slackpkg?

Brian

That's explained in the FAQ.