What is the difference between -current and 13.0?
 

I was trying to learn how to keep my Slackware 13.0 up-to-date, then I noticed there are these two types of mirrors I have to choose. If 13.0 is the latest, what is the difference?
I just changed the mirror in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors from a 13.0 to a -current server, and now I have many updates...

Another problem, when I tried to "slackpkg update" then "slackpkg check-updates" in both cases, it returned: "No news is good news"... Yet, when I used "slackpkg upgrade-all", there WERE packages to be upgraded... WHat is the purpose of "check-updates"?

Thanks in advance!

-current is the development branch of Slackware Linux, which goes through testing and gets incorporated in the next version of Slackware.
-stable is the released branch,which is 13.0 presently.

Important Info:
http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#5
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/

Regards

Thanks for the explanation, ~sHyLoCk~! I was trying to find this information on the mirrors, but couldn't...

Also, what about the check-updates option in slackpkg? Why didn't it show me there were packages to be updated?

From man page:

update:
The "update" action will download and format the list of files and packages in Slackware. Every time this list is changed, the update need to be run.

check-updates:
Verify if there is any update to ChangeLog.txt.

If there's no update to Changelog.txt, you get the message you go in your first post.

First make a choice, which branch will you follow. Stable or Current. Then uncomment one mirror from you /etc/slackpkg/mirrors

Then re-run:
If you get any error messages please post them here.

Regards

I thought that ChangeLog would contain ALL changes to the packages... I think I got it now.
So I also need to use install-new to get the newer packages...
Thanks for the info!

Close, but not quite right.

First you would use "slackpkg update" to download the latest version of the Changelog to your Slackware box.
Then you would use "slackpkg upgrade-all" to have slackpkg upgrade any packages, that you currently have installed, to their latest version in the Changelog. The "upgrade-all" option does not install newly created packages listed in the Changelog.
You would then use "slackpkg install-new" to install any new packages mentioned in the Changelog.

Not positive as to sequence, but pretty sure "slackpkg install-new" would come before "slackpkg upgrade-all". Can any one validate this?

Slackware does not care about order of installation.

Eric

To be a bit pedantic, 'install-new' *should* come before 'upgrade-all' as a matter of practice.

As an example, let's consider the tcpdump package. It's presently built in such a way that you get the tcpdump binaries *and* the libpcap libraries. If, for whatever reason, libpcap were split out into a separate package, and you just did 'upgrade-all' without first doing 'install-new', you'd be missing the libpcap shared library, and tcpdump would therefore refuse to run.

In this particular case, it's not an issue, because the system doesn't need tcpdump to boot and/or to continue running properly; however, it shouldn't be too difficult to imagine a case where it *would* cause a problem.

Thanks Robby,
I don't think it would be a problem if you run install-new later. If you forget to run install-new then it could be a problem next time you boot. However, as you mentioned it's a better practice, hence I edited my post.

Regards

It *can* be a problem before that even. Here's an entirely contrived example, but it works:

Let's pretend bash requires libbash, which is presently included in the bash package.
Now let's pretend libbash is split out into a separate package in the last batch of updates.
Now let's pretend you did 'upgrade-all' without first doing 'install-new'
Now let's accidentally close our terminal window.
Oops. :-)

Assuming your window manager has a "run" dialog (e.g. Alt F2), you can invoke "xterm -e /bin/ksh" from that to recover, but you get the idea, right? :-)

Perhaps not quite so contrived example from recent history was the release of the xz package so that the new .txz format could be supported.
The xz package was released Tue Apr 7 20:12:35 CDT 2009 and the first packages using .txz were released Fri May 8 18:49:03 CDT 2009 ( http://www.nielshorn.net/slackware/_...geLog_13.0.txt - Thanks Niels!). You would not have wanted to be away for a month without running install-new first!