long-term support...sort of

long-term support...sort of

Posted Mar 26, 2011 2:18 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
Parent article: Slackware 13.37: Linux for the fun of it

Though it's not advertised heavily, Wood points out another of Slackware's advantages — long-term support. Wood says that Slackware 8.1, released in 2002, is still receiving security updates.

That's true as far as it goes, but as with Barry Bonds, there's a big asterisk lurking there. Browser support (Firefox and SeaMonkey), for example, doesn't go back before Slackware 12.2 or 13.0, I believe; yet clearly that's one app category in which ongoing security updates would be very nice. (Not that I blame Pat for cutting things off, of course--browsers have a huge dependency list and tend to be a pain to recompile. Doing so on an "outdated" software stack becomes untenable pretty quickly.) Some other packages get updates only back to 11.0 or 10.2. I think only the simplest (least-dependent) ones go back as far as 8.x, and then only if they're considered to be in the "very high" security-risk category.

Greg

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