Slackpkg Update Fixes Long Standing Annoyance

Slackware's Slackpkg has long had a design flaw default behavior that could result in inoperative applications or systems. But Patrick Volkerding recently addressed the issue with a simple but significant change. In addition, Slackware is getting some new native packages and updates.

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, Slackware enthusiast and contributor, recently reported of a significant change in slackpkg that will instruct the package manager to download all packages needed when installing a new application or applying updates. This avoids the condition where a package in a series is installed or updated before its full dependencies and, in some extreme cases, rendering the application or subsystem inoperative. Now, as Raharjo says, "In the normal operations, slackpkg will download the packages one by one and install/upgrade them sequentially."

In addition, Raharjo is reporting that an "update to fontconfig should fixed some problem reported on LQ." And as if that wasn't enough excitement for one day, Raharjo also said that Volkerding is expanding and updating the software repositories by providing some packages requested by users. These include "MariaDB-5.5.31, MC-4.8.8, Python-2.7.5, and Samba-4.0.6. Minor packages "gawk, gdb, gmp, and nettle" also got updates. Raharjo said to hang on because a bunch of updates are expected in current due to all the necessary recompiling. Those should start appearing any time.

Current currently features Linux 3.8.13, Xorg X Server 1.13.4, GCC 4.8.0, KDE 4.10.3, Firefox 21.0, and GIMP 2.8.4.  See this article to get started with Slackware Current.