[SOLVED] Mr. Volkerding please release 15.0 as soon as possible even sooner
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Not me at least. For me using -current is a real torture. Each upgrade breaks every single dependency of anything I've built locally and it takes me a few months of "libfoo.so.6 not found" to recover. I was about to quit slackware after 25 years just because of this pain. 14.2 is not maintained anymore (let's be serious, even vulnerabilities in openssl are not fixed anymore), and -current having been on -current over the last two years showed me only the dark side of slackware, that overall remains the best distro I've worked with, but which has been terribly painful over these years. So I'm really impatient to see 15.0 tomorrow and know that I'll have a few years of maintenance back.
It becomes really critical to fix a release periodicity. Especially for distros, there's always something important that gets released the week after a release, it's not possible to have to adapt to other software's pacing. Periodic releases engage more of the community into testing and upgrading. It also gets more users of -current because all those who would have like to have imminent version X or Y of foo will upgrade to -current and those are never the same so overall you get more feedback and it helps stabilizing what's going to be released.
This has done wonders on plenty other software, including the linux kernel and other distros, there is no reason it cannot work here.
Waitwaitwait... So wtarreau himself is the reason why that magical piece of software compiles flawlessly every time I do it on slack? Thank you Willy, thank you Pat. Praise Bob.
So release date for 15 must be a wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing?
Edit: I meant it as a reference to The Doctor never being early or late but arriving precisely when intended - then, after submitting, realised I was actually thinking of a Gandalf quote.
Last edited by fido_dogstoyevsky; 01-15-2022 at 05:32 PM.
It becomes really critical to fix a release periodicity. Especially for distros, there's always something important that gets released the week after a release, it's not possible to have to adapt to other software's pacing. Periodic releases engage more of the community into testing and upgrading. It also gets more users of -current because all those who would have like to have imminent version X or Y of foo will upgrade to -current and those are never the same so overall you get more feedback and it helps stabilizing what's going to be released.
This has done wonders on plenty other software, including the linux kernel and other distros, there is no reason it cannot work here.
I agree.
OT: congrats for HAProxy! I have just a laptop and a tower, nevertheless I do realize the benefit that big players and their users can draw of a high performance load balancer.
We all have different experiences is absolutely true. I have trouble when on -current because I can't tell when the "upgraded" current package will break some packaged I've built locally. Share your discernment of when to "upgrade" while on current, and when to "stay" at current level. I like that Pat is saying we're at RC3 and frozen, but then he throws in that 5.15.15 might sound nice. Well a year ago wasn't there disruption from a certain 5.10.y causing blank screens when added to current? (it's rhetorical). This is why I stay on stable, give me the security fixes for packages and kernels. Give me the other upgrades and rebuilds as options. If there was one thing I'd hope for in the next release it would be that slackpkg would add a command to filter for only security upgrades, like upgrade-security. Now I have to read the change log (both Slackware's and Kernel.org) in detail to look for security changes, write the packages down, then start slackpkg upgrade and only name the security impact packages. I utilize five to seven year old hardware. I don't need the latest package for my workflow to be efficient. I realize some do need the latest and slickest, and Pat needs to continue to make decisions as more of Linux slide away from the UNIX philosophy of one package doing one thing well, to accommodate the changing Linux world. Even when stable is declared, I know that KDE will have changes and upgrades because that's what happened with 14.2. But off this side point, back to my initial question, would you share your discernment process for when to upgrade under -current?
I am using older hardware, because of that I could have stayed with slackware64-14.2. I didn't because when Alien Bob started up ktown, I wanted that, to use that I need to be on slackware64-current. That was 2010, I'm still on slackware64-current and plan to stay with slackware64-current. On my laptop, I may decide to go with slackware64-15.0 when it is released.
Those of us using slackware64-current choose to do so for various reasons. I like being part of the development of Slackware, thus the reason I plan to stay with slackware64-current on at least this computer.
As for slackpkg 'filtering" only security fixes, I disagree. If you are using the development tree of Slackware regardless of reasons, you must keep in mind this is a development tree, that, like it or not you are a tester of same. Therefor you should update all packages regardless of type. After 15.0 is released, switch to that from current and the need for "filtering" goes away.
My discernment process for when to upgrade? It's pretty simple. On this computer, my main and daily use computer, I update soon after I get the email notification my local mirror of slackware64-current has been updated. Things that might cause me to delay a bit would be a boost, icu4c or poppler "version bump" or an update the would affect the few packages I use from Alien Bob's repository. Quite often it's a combination of those anyway. All of my packages use SlackBuild scripts I have created. So it's just a matter of rebuilding the affected packages. I normally look for updates so some packages with be upgrades, vice rebuilds. I keep two kernels installed al the time. One is a "lastworking" kernel. If the new one causes problems I can fail back to the last working one. Most common reason to fail back is NVIDIA or VirtualBox failing to build. I also prioritize what gets rebuilt/upgraded first. For example, my email client gets done first.
Last edited by chrisretusn; 01-16-2022 at 12:36 AM.
Distribution: slackware, slackware from scratch, LFS, slackware [arm], linux Mint...
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I don't believe it will be tomorrow, new packages with only one day to track bugs, a bit risky from my point of view.
When you really want to release a stable version, you don't introduce at the last minute new packages except a new kernel and you only correct the remaining bugs, and that for at least a week, otherwise it make cause more hurt than anything else.
It's what we call "pre-maintenance in operational conditions": don't touch what works, like it's with slackware-14.2 for the time being.
I don't think Patrick Volkerding has the same idea of a "Release Candidate" as you and I have. To me it's more like he has succumbed to the "latest and greatest" syndrome that most of the bigger distro's also suffer from.
Waitwaitwait... So wtarreau himself is the reason why that magical piece of software compiles flawlessly every time I do it on slack? Thank you Willy, thank you Pat. Praise Bob.
To be honest, most software compiled from sources work fine on Slackware. Despite its release cycle which makes me want to give up every 4-5 years, it remains an extremely clean distro with little to no modifications applied to packages, with everything installed at the expected location, without the --enable-newbie-warnings that break -Werror for each untested syscall, and without tons of aliased packages, wrappers or rewrites "because one can". I'm not really a package user myself, and I despise autoconf for often failing to detect stuff that it doesn't even need, so I'm extremely careful at stuff that builds out of the box and leaves control to the user rather than stuff that magically works 90% of the time and remains unfixable the 10% remaining.
It's for sure that my approach to source code distribution has been influenced by my use of Slackware since 1995. Probably that different initial directions would have led me do distribute .deb or .rpm that require a myriad of dependencies and only work on the developer's distro :-)
But at least I moved years ago to periodic releases and that has boosted my project, allowing to break development more often and with less constraints, offering a much faster development pace with significantly less efforts, while providing more stability to users. Plus they stopped asking when it's release... Pat if you read this... ;-)
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