Excluded packages during udpate process

[rsal]

I am using salixos-14-XFCE with Mate desktop and vmlinuz-huge-smp-3.2.45-smp kernel (without initrd). I am finding it a beautiful, lean, fast and smooth distribution with regular updates and a very good overall Linux experience. I also noticed that Salixos has risen in Distrowatch.com rankings. Congratulations to all the Salixos developers.

However, whenever there is an update, following packages are shown to be excluded from update:
glibc 2.15-i486-8_slack14.0
kernel-firmware 20130512git-noarch-1
kernel-headers 3.2.45_smp-x86-3

Why are these 3 packages excluded from the update process? Thanks for your help.

[gapan]

Because these are considered "dangerous" updates.

Upgrading glibc may result in a completely broken system that can only be fixed from another installation. In this specific case though, the update is harmless and you can update from the command line:

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slapt-get -i glibc

Updating the kernel packages is also dangerous if the user updates it without realizing it. That is because after you update the kernel, you need to run lilo to refresh the boot loader. Otherwise, your new kernel won't boot. If you take care of running lilo after upgrading, you can safely upgrade every kernel package using slapt-get as above.

[rsal]

I think it is very sensible to keep "dangerous" package updation separate from usual updates as you have done here.

I am using grub-legacy for booting. Will I need to change the menu.lst entry after updating kernel-firmware and kernel-headers?

[gapan]

What does your menu.lst look like now?

[rsal]

Currently it has only following lines:

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title Salix14-xfce huge-kernel 
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-3.2.45-smp root=/dev/sda6 ro quiet

[gapan]

That shows that your kernel is updated already.

[rsal]

I installed all 3 packages with "slapt-get -i" command. Everything went well and the system is working well even after reboot.

This approach of updating important/dangerous/system packages separately from other packages seems unique to Salixos. It allows both novice and expert users to run Salixos in their own way while maintaining stability. I did not see this feature in Debian or Arch linux, where all packages are updated together and are not categorized. I wonder if regular Slackware linux has this feature?

[gapan]

I wonder if regular Slackware linux has this feature?

Of course. Using slackpkg instead of slapt-get, but it does.