Swaret addresses one of my only gripes with Slackware: an easy way to upgrade an entire system. I've had very few problems with it. I agree with the points fellow posters have made: Only use official mirrors when doing system wide upgrades. Only use linuxpackages.net when installing 3rd party apps like firefox, mplayer or k3b. Also, don't upgrade lilo and kernel. Follow those rules and you should be golden. I had Gentoo on another box and that was completely hosed during an emerge upgrade. Granted that was over 1.5 years ago so it may of gotten better since then.

Mindebender, i', glad you thought of creating this poll. I'm a newbie to Slack in the throes of trying to use swaret to get upgraded from 9.1 to 10.0. So far, no luck!

I don't understand what your problem is.

Change the version to 10.0
comment out all repos use root only

swaret --update
swaret --upgrade -a

wait about 2 hours

Or better yet, for upgrading to 10 burn the new iso and then follow the instructions Patrick provided in the UPGRADE.TXT file.

I didn't vote because there's nothing really for my situation:

First time I used it, hosed my system. I couldn't compile anything, ALSA was screwed up, etc. I had to reinstall, and then when I ran it that next time, it worked fine.

It's been working great for me up until now. Now whenever I do swaret --update, it craps out on the last check. I think it only does that when I have the version as 10.0 instead of current. But anyway, it seems to work fine for me when I have version=current.

I did exactly all of this. It listed about 20 lib-type files that I had to search for. I then tried --dep and got the same result: I have to search for them. I then changed my swaret.conf to include the Repos for Linuxpackages, and it gave me the smae result again.

Now I'm on a fresh install of Slack, and think i'll pass on swaret. As soon as I can get a full download of the new Slack 10,0, I'll try the suggestion by Hangdog42. And learn how to install pakages by using installpkg, since that is what comes with slack.

What about an option

If I needed stupid upgrade tools I'd be using debilian, gentoo or mandreck?

? :)


Cheers,
Tink

I have not had any major problems. For dependencies, I prefer use linuxquestions tool.

That is what the "I have not had any major problems with swaret, but I don't use it because I prefer to manually manage packages." option is for. Thanks for your constructive and helpful comment though.

Doesn't cover that case, though.

To "not have had any major problems" I would have
had to at least give it a test-run.

Oh well ...


Cheers,
Tink

If you haven't used it then you haven't had any problems with it, have you?

Option 2 is for if you don't use swaret because you don't want or need to use an automated package tool (which is apparently your case).

You're excused, you're American, I don't expect you to
know the finer nuances of the English language.

Cheers,
Tink

That seems a bit uncalled-for...

We
speak
AMERICAN
english

I have only good experiences with swaret, and i have been using it for something about 1 year now. Once I have installed a package, that was missing some libraries and then, swaret just found the "right " package, that contained the libs, asked me to donwload and installed, and that was all. The package was ofcourse from official site....

I don't think it is a best package tool, but for me it does everything I need: Just to stay up 2 date with 10.0 or current version of slackware when new official packages are released....