[Slackbuilds-users] Package versions

[David Spencer]

A few constructive thoughts --

Many years ago the advice was that we should not always update our
SlackBuilds for simple version bumps, because it's easy to use
VERSION=. But I think times have changed, git makes the whole process
easier for the admins and we are always happy to see updates.

The best time to update your SlackBuilds is maybe halfway between
Slackware releases.  So now would be a very good time for maintainers
to submit updates.  Yes, *NOW*!!  please!

We could try to show "last updated" information on more pages on the
website, however this information is already available from cgit.
Personally I don't think we want to have "flagged out-of-date" like
Arch.  But if someone wanted to start a one-off audit of the repo, it
would be a very big task but maybe helpful. There are some resources
like Anitya that might be helpful -- https://release-monitoring.org/

Maybe we should reach out to all the maintainers once a year (or so)
and ask them if they need help with particular packages, or if they
wish to continue?

As a radical idea, we could consider making some packages
auto-updating. I suspect lots of perl, python, haskell and ruby could
be completely automated. I bet everybody hates this idea :p

On the other hand, George from Salix made a very good point when he
recently wrote "SBo has a policy of constantly updating its contents
with new versions, which in my opinion is competely against
Slackware's policy (as well as our own) for stability". I do have a
lot of respect for that point of view.  I think the main reasons
against it are social not technical (too much work at one time for new
releases, need to keep maintainers involved). Having said that, for
technical reasons quite a lot of packages do need to be quite stable
between releases (haskell, ffmpeg and more -- everybody on the list
could probably name them).

There are three new messages since I started writing -- eek!!

Cheers
-D.