Rolling Release of Salix?

[mimosa]

I eat my words. But I don't know how djemos does all that work on his own

Maybe you could try Slackel, but replace KDE with a lighter DE from whatever repos Slackel points at.

[jayseye]

Yes mimosa, I might retain KDE (or just its libs) for occasional use of great programs like K3B, KDevelop and, IMO, Konqeror. Those actually work great under Fluxbox, from personal experience.

For everyday use I'd install XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and twm, using each as appropriate for different scenarios. Eventually I may choose an overall favorite; for now, all I know is that it will be something other than twm

The Google Plus discussion, linked in a prior reply in this thread, has returned to English. There I learned that the process of adding dependencies to Slackel is largely automated, borrowing both scripts and data from Salix.

[mimosa]

Hmm but isn't there a lot of rebuilding of packages needed, too? In the days of Salix alpha, things kept breaking all the time; it was completely unusable. Slackel, on the other hand, seems to be reasonably stable throughout the release cycle.

[jayseye]

Package building? The way I see it mimosa, Slackware -current is already a rolling binary distro. The essence of what Slackel does, from what I've read, is adding dependencies, and fine-tuning GSlapt and a few custom Salix tools, as needed.

I do think that Pat and his team strive to keep -current in a usable state. They back things out when needed, so Slackel has to track that too. Also there are useful packages to be gleaned from the Alien and RWorkman repos, such as OpenJDK. Adapting a handful of stuff like that, likely accounts for most of the package building and troubleshooting.

If this were G+ I'd mention +djemos by name and, if he were interested, he might jump into this discussion. Given this Forum though, first I'll download and test Slackel, and will wait to have a specific goal before attempting to conjure up the genie

[mimosa]

My head is beginning to hurt

Surely if you change certain things (like glibc) everything else breaks? It happened every other day for a while back there with the Salix Alpha.

I await enlightenment in some future packaging cycle. Meanwhile, I've got my last package of the year to tinker with

[jayseye]

OK sorry, you may be catching the migraine that I fought yesterday One final thought to rule them all, then:

In effect, Pat et al do manual dependency resolution, rebuilding groups of packages as needed, and that gets reflected in the Slackware -current changelog. On your PC, GSlapt / slapt-get will then update all those related packages together, if you simply allow that to occur. If (when) packages get missed in this process, bug reports will trigger Pat to rebuild those packages, and that gets reflected in the changelog with entries such as, "games/xyzzy Rebuilt for updated glibc." So folks who test -current make up an ecosystem that closes the loop of human dependency management.

Good luck on your package, and thanks for the help here!

[mimosa]

Thanks jayseye. Good luck to you too. I just hope you don't end up in Mordor

[hugok]

A Stable distro... is the way to go!

[djemos]

Package building? The way I see it mimosa, Slackware -current is already a rolling binary distro. The essence of what Slackel does, from what I've read, is adding dependencies, and fine-tuning GSlapt and a few custom Salix tools, as needed.

I agree with this. Slackel has it's own slackware current repos with dependencies, pull packages from salix as they run on current and has also its own package repos.
I have to add also that there are packages not included on slackware and they have to build from source, making new SLKBUILDS. e.g. libreoffice-3.6.2, latest openjdk-7u9, openjre-7u9 (they build from source and they are not alienbob binaries), kdenlive, kvirc and many more i can't mention here. Also a lot of testing need, so always slackel can be stable. there are packages that pull of salix repo packages. But after a while (months maybe) a lot of them have to rebuild or patched to run on slackware current. So more work is necessary.

This is a huge work, the users don't understand. Another huge work is to test and build the final iso's.
Slackel is a mix of slackware current tree and salix stable tree with latest kde and new versions of apps not included on slackware.
Without salix-tools (and great job of gapan, jrd, akuna, shador and all salix developers and packagers) slackel will be less usable for newbies.
Slackel is like a laboratory. If you want a stable distro then use Salix. If you like to test things and be as much as possible stable then use Slackel.

Slackel will always follow slackware current and latest kde desktop. When a stable version of slackware released a stable slackel will released also (slackel-kde-14.0 for example).
And after this the next version with slackware current and latest kde will follow. So the livedvd's of slackel-kde-4.9.2 (32 and 64 bit) are tested and will released the next one -two days.

[mimosa]

Thank you djemos for all that work. Slackel has been invaluable to me because of troubles with the older kernel - and though my own hardware isn't really up to KDE, it looks great. I recently installed Slackel for a friend new to Linux.