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On the road to Slackware 12
After Slackware 11.0 was released last October the Slackware-current
changelog was pretty quiet. Firefox 2.0 became optionally available to
Slackers and there were a few security fixes, but for several months the
entry heading up the log was this one from November 9th.
Thu Nov 9 18:16:50 CST 2006
Q: Hey, what's the deal with -current?
A: Renovations are underway to the toolchain (gcc, glibc, binutils, etc),
and it makes little sense to update what is essentially Slackware 11.0
only to do the work all over again once the new toolchain is ready.
In addition, these things aren't going as smoothly as anticipated.
I'd like to put the NPTL version of glibc into /lib and the LinuxThreads
version into /lib/obsolete/linuxthreads (since some old binaries are
going to need them), but doing this prevents the use of a 2.4 kernel.
Perhaps it's finally time to drop support for Linux 2.4? Personally,
I'd rather not as 2.4 is more forgiving of flaky hardware and thus
tends to get better uptimes (at least on the servers I run ;-).
Comments about this issue are welcomed.
glibc-2.5 has also been having some problems with locale support here
that need to be investigated and dealt with. I'd rather base the glibc
in Slackware on an official glibc release, but using the development
repo is also something under (slight) consideration if it works
better.
That changed this week with this lengthy changelog notice going back to this November 20th entry.
Mon Nov 20 14:31:25 CST 2006 Thanks to everyone who provided valuable feedback on the question below. It looks as if Slackware -current (future 12.0?) is going to charge into 2.6-only territory, but it will be a conservative "charge". :-) The overwhelming consensus is that the 2.6 series is now more than stable enough for production use. Some folks expressed concern over the loss of Linux 2.4.x compatibility, but they were a definite minority. Some suggested maintaining two -current branches -- one following 2.4 and the other 2.6. The solution that'll be taken concerning 2.4.x will be to make Slackware 11.0 better maintained than simply security updates. It should see some other non-security updates as well (perhaps the introduction of an /updates directory?), and will be a long lived OS for those who swear by the stability of the 2.4.x kernel series. Meanwhile, 2.4.x compatibility features (such as the, er, mess? going on in the startup scripts) will be steadily eliminated in -current to focus on the best possible 2.6.x support. With a lot of work, we should be able to make the next Slackware release an excellent choice for both servers and desktops. Again -- thanks for all the input! :-) So what's new for the next Slackware release, besides a 2.6 kernel? Many packages have been upgraded. Several packages have been added to go along with the modular X.org upgrade. Python 2.5 is in along with newer versions of Ruby, Samba and several version control systems (git, Subversion, Mercurial). The init scripts have been split into a new package to go along with an upgrade to sysvinit-2.86. The current kernel is Linux 2.6.18.8 and KDE 3.5.6 is in. All in all there's been quite a bit of removal of old cruft, shiny new packages added, many things split and rearranged. From the March 17th entry:
Sat Mar 17 19:14:35 CDT 2007 Happy St. Patrick's Day! :-) This is more-or-less stable (functionally), but there's still a lot of package splitting and other rearranging and adding to be done, but it's time for the Slackware community to see how far we've gotten. If the luck o' the Irish is with us, it'll be a fairly short alpha/beta/rc period from here. Well, have fun! (Log in to post comments)
On the road to Slackware 12 Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:14 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] Cool, finally Linux 2.6. comes to Slakcware :-)
Which gcc version will it be ? Will it come with CMake >= 2.4.5 ? What
Alex
On the road to Slackware 12 Posted Mar 23, 2007 3:35 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I checked the -current ChangeLog. GCC 4.1.2 is there (upgraded in February from 4.1.1), and glibc 2.5. It's interesting to see the HUGE number of packages in Slackware now that the developers have also upgraded the X11 packages to the 7.x. Instead of about a dozen large X11 packages in Slack 11, there now appear to be around 150 small ones! (I know, it's part of how Xorg modularized all of X11 for release 7 - which I do like.) Going somewhat off-topic: Does anyone suppose the Slack team avoided posting all these updated packages to the -current ChangeLog since last November 9's entry due to the fact that the kernel, gcc, and glibc updates alone raised the possibility that users installing these would seriously risk reliability problems with existing Slackware packages? Perhaps I just answered my own question... ;-)
On the road to Slackware 12 Posted Mar 23, 2007 3:49 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Sorry, forgot to answer the rest of your questions.
I suspect Patrick V. and colleagues don't think Qt4 is stable enough just yet. KDE 3.5.6 is there, as is a lot of the 3D desktop X11 stuff (I saw compiz-0.3.6 somewhere). A bunch of Fred Flintstone-era packages have been removed, mostly those replaced by newer packages with a different name. HPIJS has been replaced by HPLIP, the old raidtools has been replaced by mdadm, and GDK-pixbuf has been removed. I'm mildly disappointed that they're yanking XMMS, my personal favorite MP3/Ogg/Wav player, since I use it all the time. Oh well, either I get the source and build it, or I find another player...
On the road to Slackware 12 Posted Mar 24, 2007 13:56 UTC (Sat) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] Cool :-)I'm still on Slackware 9.1 here. I didn't want to upgrade to 10 and 11 still wasn't worth it (still kernel 2.4, gcc 3). So I'll finally upgrade to Slackware 12 and have a up-to-date system again :-)
Alex
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