On a remote server (on a vps) I have a complete installation of 14.2 except 4 series: kde, kdei, xap, and xfce. I wrote them to the /etc/slackpkg/blacklist.
Now I need to install one package from xap: imagemagick.
Is there any way to whitelist imagemagick without installing the whole series xap?

I think the best way to do that is by specifying the packages in /etc/slackpkg/greylist , but it will be unselected when running upgrade-all.

If xap is in the blacklist, then greylist will change nothing. If xap is not in the blacklist, then greylist will change [X] to [ ]. This doesn't make 'slackpkg install-new' usable. Or I don't understand your idea.

Can't you just remove xap from the blacklist and do `slackpkg install imagemagick`? It will not install the whole xap series. If you're not on -current, you shouldn't need to run install-new.

Is it warranted? I understand that it's unusual to have a new package in stable, but is it really impossible?

Stable rarely adds new packages, but its perfectly safe to run install-new when there are no new packages to install and it will not take much more time.

Then my question remains valid: how to blacklist all xap except imagemagick?

Well, just from looking at the ChangeLog for 14.2, I see there have been 0 new packages added since it was released. Just for fun, I also looked at the ChangeLog for 13.0, and there have been 0 new packages added since it was released in 2009. So I think it's pretty safe to say you do not need to run install-new on a -stable release.

I mean to remove xap from /etc/slackpkg/blacklist
Then add xap packages to /etc/slackpkg/greylist

Then when you do an "install-new" or "upgrade-pkg", you'll have to select the ones you want (greylisted packages will be deselected), so you would then manually select imagemagick for example.

You didn't look at 13.37:

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Fair enough. Still an exceedingly rare occurrence.

Wouldn't this be enough to keep stable up to date in all cases?

install-new or upgrade-all would not be needed and the blacklist content would not matter.

It sounds like it, though I didn't know that you could use the "patches" keyword with slackpkg. Good to know!

You shouldn't need to blacklist those in most cases. install-new will look at the changelog and present any new packages that have been added to Slackware since the last time you ran slackpkg update. upgrade-all will only present programs that are already installed.

The blacklist is more to prevent already installed packages from being updated. Say if you decided to manually upgrade mesa to a newer version, you'd add mesa to prevent you from consistently getting prompted to "update" mesa to the stock version.

So, the only way you'd possibly run into issues is if you were to accidentally run slackpkg install xap or if any programs get added to stable Slackware (which, as seen above, is not likely) that would fall under one of those groups.

If xap is not blacklisted, install-new will suggest to install it, because it is not installed and thus "new"!

On the link https://docs.slackware.com/talk:slac...eginners_guide Serg Bormant wrote about packages added to stable:Thus, this is extremely rare.

Now, thanks to the above discussion, I think a good solution will be the following. On a computer with complete install, run via cron a script that will doand then check if the output reads "No packages match the pattern for install". If not, it will send mail.

I mark this thread as [SOLVED].