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Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

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Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not adequate sorry. I am not happy with mailing lists for community building. And I know of Linuxquestions.com forums, but that's not adequate either. Seriously, it would take 60 minutes to get this sorted, and 30 bucks yearly of hosting these forums.

So do it.

No way. The NIH is strong.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#82
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical about the word "modern" these days. slackpkg is a good package manager and does everything you need to keep your system up-to-date. From the slackware website: "Slackware is designed around the idea that the system should be a complete installation kept updated with any official patches. This avoids the mess of dependencies that some other Linux based GNU systems face." Why remake the website? The…

It's not adequate sorry. I am not happy with mailing lists for community building. And I know of Linuxquestions.com forums, but that's not adequate either. Seriously, it would take 60 minutes to get this sorted, and 30 bucks yearly of hosting these forums.

Using Slackware and expecting modern frills is a bit like buying an old hot rod or turbo import from the old Soviet Union and then complaining it doesn't have a factory warranty or a customer support line. You don't buy it because it's going to be easy to drive and maintain.

There is an owner's manual and a community of other enthusiasts. If you want more convenience, your best bet is to try a different make and model.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are mailing lists and forums missing for you? What killer features do you think that the Slackware team need to implement beyond what they currently have? I ask in all sincerity because you haven't mentioned it in your post.

The community. As a user and potential contributor, I need that. Also I am sounding like a downer... I'm sorry about that. My strong opinions can often be too much, and I get that because they might sound negative. I am saying the things as a long time Slack user that gave up.

But what is 'the community' to you? To many Slackware users it's precisely the mailing list, the LinuxQuestions forum, the subreddit (/r/slackware), things like slackbuilds.org and docs.slackware.com.

So what is missing from what Slackware currently offers that would make have 'the community' to you?

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#84
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I am still stuck in my own version of RPM hell, and yes I have packaged RPM's. The problem: production servers for a client use RHEL 6.3 and are very slow to upgrade. Moreover, they don't have the subscription to RH's commercial repos, and instead host their own, which means that some packages are straight up missing. For development I use CentOS of a matching version. All works well until I go to deploy s…

I too am mostly a Debian guy but it sounds like your situation has less to do with RPM than it does with a client putting themselves in a crazy situation. The whole point of getting your OS from RH is that RH has a book that you can do things by and be pretty well assured of the results. When they decided to no longer subscribe to that they really should have switched to a community managed Linux version. I can't ima…

I assume so, though the part where yum could not figure out the server's architecture was really odd.

I would love for them to move to CentOS, or Fedora or whatever. The problem is that they are a huge healthcare company, and I am a part time subcontractor.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community. As a user and potential contributor, I need that. Also I am sounding like a downer... I'm sorry about that. My strong opinions can often be too much, and I get that because they might sound negative. I am saying the things as a long time Slack user that gave up.

But what is 'the community' to you? To many Slackware users it's precisely the mailing list, the LinuxQuestions forum, the subreddit (/r/slackware), things like slackbuilds.org and docs.slackware.com. So what is missing from what Slackware currently offers that would make have 'the community' to you?

Based on what I have seen elsewhere (other distros and other major software projects), I am saying it would benefit greatly from a better approach.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#86
post #76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just not the sense to use it :-( A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM…

Sure down vote BUT defend your opposition to the point of this blog post that I pointed out. It is 100% not RPM issues that this person is talking about. Okay so by the down votes I guess people prefer to think RPM is bad and won't take anything from anyone pointing out how it works and that the article used was full of holes by someone that doesn't understand package management. I SAID STUPID: Ye sit is stupid to re…

"this guy" and "this person" with the "stupid blog post" is Felix von Leitner, for reference. Understand that, and understand things like diet libc, libowfat, and minit, and you will understand some of the bases of M. von Leitner's opinions here.

* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#87

For those of you that don't know about Slackware. Slackware is the oldest distro and it is still plenty alive today. When to setup linux on my computer in the early days with other distros (red hat/suse/etc), this would eventually crap up (rpm hell) and give me something unusable. Using Slackware forces you understand how everything works in a linux distro. This lets you fix your own problems.

It's not the oldest. SLS predates slackware (as do a few others iirc) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System Slack was awesome back in the day, but the the philosophy as being "as unix like as possible" prevented it evolving and adding nice things like package managers. Using slackware is a good exercise, but I'd never use it for an application I care about.

> the philosophy as being "as unix like as possible" prevented it evolving and adding nice things like package managers

Others have pointed out that the existence of Slackware package management gives the lie to that assertion. It remains to point out that Unices had package managers, so being "Unix like" does not involve eschewing package management at all. XENIX had a package management system, for example. It originated in AT&T System V Release 4, was also present in Solaris, and has been picked up by the Heirloom Project.

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1M/pkgadd.1M.html

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1/pkginfo.1.html

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1M/pkgrm.1M.html

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1/pkgtrans.1.html

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1M/pkgchk.1M.html

* http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/man/html.1M/pkgask.1M.html

* http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/pkgtools.html

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#88
post #74
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translate... We have the technology, just not the sense to use it :-(

> just not the sense to use it :-( A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM…

Claims made in the blog post:

1. There's two forks of RPM. According to Wikipedia, this seems to be correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager#Forks

2. Most of the complaints are about RPM's build chain and the bloat included in it. NSS/NSPR: RPM doesn't care about any standard ways of configuring them – nspr-config, pkg-config, LSB default folders, … ) BDB: Needs to be copied into RPM's source tree. RPM doesn't build its python modules (needed by yum etc.) by default. Yum has a hard dependency on sqlitecachec but doesn't declare it. (sqlitecachec is the piece of software from 2010, BTW.)

(No idea whether those are accurate.)

3. The gnome comparison is, again, related to the build system: RPM does not check all build- and runtime dependencies before building, you have to determine them by trial and error.

(No idea whether this is accurate either.)

4. RPM packages are binary, and to inspect them you either need specialized tools or, well, hex editors. (Also seems to be correct.) This is a marked difference from all competing formats, which are plain text. DEB packages are ar(1) archives with some special files, all ASCII text. Same for Pacman packages (which are tars).

5. I don't think his "package manager wishlist" is unreasonable. A statically compiled package manager that works without any external dependencies is desirable, as it e.g. allows cross-installation from other platforms, and makes the system harder to break with botched updates.

6. Another complaint is the dependency bloat: Why use a mixture of XML text databases (repodata) backed by an SQLite cache (yum) and BDB databases (rpm)? (No idea what's an accurate representation.)

Generally, Fefe has been lobbying for less complex, easier to maintain, easier to verify, more resource efficient software for over a decade. His projects – gatling, dietlibc, minit, fgetty … – show it.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#89
post #76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just not the sense to use it :-( A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM…

Sure down vote BUT defend your opposition to the point of this blog post that I pointed out. It is 100% not RPM issues that this person is talking about. Okay so by the down votes I guess people prefer to think RPM is bad and won't take anything from anyone pointing out how it works and that the article used was full of holes by someone that doesn't understand package management. I SAID STUPID: Ye sit is stupid to re…

> Ye sit is stupid to request a package manager that uses unsecured packages with disabled SSL and curl and wget to download packages and manage them so that any hacker could install any package it wants with a simple script.

That was not the demand. The demand was a package manager that works without requiring openssl as a dynamically linked dependency, so the package manager still works if those dependencies are broken or missing (due to e.g. a botched update) and can repair dynamic libraries for the rest of the system.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#90
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical about the word "modern" these days. slackpkg is a good package manager and does everything you need to keep your system up-to-date. From the slackware website: "Slackware is designed around the idea that the system should be a complete installation kept updated with any official patches. This avoids the mess of dependencies that some other Linux based GNU systems face." Why remake the website? The…

But... slackpkg is not part of Slackware, its a third party tool.

slackpkg ships as part of the default slackware installation. Are you thinking of sbopkg which is used to build packages from slackbuilds.org?
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