[Slackbuilds-users] Support for Slackware derivatives

[Robby Workman]

Support for Slackware derivatives, particularly the 64 bit flavors,
has been a much-discussed topic in the SlackBuilds.org community
for most of its existence.  For a long time, we didn't really take
a position on whether our scripts would support other Slackware-like
distributions (again, especially 64bit stuff).  As time went on, we
accepted a few changes here and there to make something build on
Slamd64 (wine, for example), and that seemed to be a good thing.
Presently, we've seen a much greater interest in having our scripts
support Slamd64, and several people have volunteered to maintain the
changes such support would require.

We (the project admins) have discussed this quite a bit, trying to
look at both the good points and bad points of supporting other
Slackware-like distributions, and we have decided that we will not
do so any longer, effective as of the release of Slackware 12.1.
It's a bit of a "slippery slope" to support one derivative and not
another, or to support one more than another, and we never want to
be in a position where there's pressure to change how we do things
in order to facilitate support for something other than Slackware
(that should not be construed as a statement that such has happened).

To quell any rumors that might start due to this announcement, there
are absolutely NO ill feelings toward any Slackware derivative on the
part of the SlackBuilds.org team, and especially not toward Slamd64 -
Fred and I are friends.  This decision is purely a technical one -
we simply cannot afford to invest the extra time to maintain things
targeting something other than Slackware.

With that said, we hope that the community surrounding any interested
Slackware derivatives will use the material at SlackBuilds.org as a
starting point, and we wish them only the best.

Cordially,
Robby Workman
on behalf of the SlackBuilds.org admin team