[Slackbuilds-users] Package versions

[Nicolas Kovacs]

Le 19/01/2017 à 18:46, Full Name a écrit :
> Having said that, all too often maintainers do not update the
> software all that promptly. It is not uncommon to have Slackbuilds
> packages that are several releases behind what one can get from
> distributions like (shudder) Fedora or (shudder!) Ubuntu. This can be
> a critical issue - I have been in the position of the gentleman who
> enquired about docker, and I eventually had to install an Ubuntu VM
> in my Slackware box, for the docker version in Slackware is just too
> old for what I needed to do. Unfortunately, pinging maintainers does
> not always work. In fact, having tried that myself in connection to
> other packages, I never got any replies, and the relevant packages
> remain behind the current versions.

+1 on that, with a little side note.

IMHO, a distinction should be made between potentially critical packages
and those that are not. I'm maintaining a couple of more or less exotic
packages on SBo: french translations for man pages, icon themes,
wallpaper collections. If these are not the latest and greatest, it's
not a problem, as long as the provided source URL still works.

On the other hand, a period of neglect could become a problem with
mission-critical software like Postfix or Dovecot, and these two have
occasionally been behind in the past.

This being said, everyone has their own solution for this. I'm
maintaining my own package repositories at
http://www.microlinux.fr/microlinux/. A roughly estimated 80 % of these
repositories is more or less directly derived from SBo (huge pat on the
shoulder to everybody here). Still, this is a significant load of work.
On the latest count:

[kikinovak at alphamule:~] $ find ~/Public/ -name '*.txz' | wc -l
1534

Cheers,

Niki

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