Niki Kovacs wrote:

> Le Sat, 22 Apr 2006 23:56:21 +0000, ANC a écrit*:
>
>> And even for basic package management a lot of experienced Slack users
>> hold both swaret and slpat-get in disdain.
>
> === Discarded package managers ===
>
> * apt-get (Debian)
> * emerge (Gentoo)
> * rpm (RH)
> * urpmi (Mandrake/Mandriva)
> * pacman (Arch/Frugalware)
>
> === Actually in use ===
>
> * brain (Slackware)
>
> Easier than you might think.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Niki


Thanks for your response, but some of us prefer to spend our time and brain
on getting some work done with the machine, and not doing research on the
machine and its OS itself.

After 2-3 days of indecision, considering in rapid succession, FreeBSD,
Gentoo, staying with Slackware, etc. I decided that enough was enough. No
aspersion cast on the authors of swaret, but if it cannot even order the
updates correctly and leaves behind a hosed system, I cannot waste any time
on that. So, this machine, the last remaining non-Debian machine that I
have, also went the Debian (Sarge) way early this morning.

Debian stable is also pretty secure and stable, and is often the OS of
choice for critical servers, and I do not imagine its going to be inferior
to Slackware in that respect. I did notice one thing though - I did not
have to go to any website to download packages like I had to with
linuxpackages.net when installing Slackware 2 years ago.

Slackware is great distribution and I really enjoyed using it, but this lack
of a good package management system as a viable choice (no, swaret is not
it, yet) while retaining the choice of the rest of purists who can continue
to do things their preferred way, is a serious problem. It wasn't so, when
barring Debian, every other distribution depended on going to websites,
hunting down dependencies manually, and then installing them in the
hopefully right order. That has changed - almost every other major
distribution (major here means - independent - so Slackware is major while
Ubuntu, IMO, is not) provides such a choice.

While loss of user base should not be a concern to Pat, it also reduces the
number of people who test the packages, and can leave things undertested by
users. I am not saying that there have been a lot of bugs found in
Slackware (unless you rightly consider this mess by swaret to be a bug),
but it is inevitable if the number of users shrinks.

Thanks to everyone on alt.os.linux.slackware who have helped me over time
with Slackware. Barring one or two (like RM), this is the most helpful and
courteous NG I have ever used. Who knows, I might come back to Slack one
day if swaret becomes the goods