… perhaps even to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Just kidding of course. From today’s ChangeLog.txt for Slackware “current“:

?Sun Mar 27 08:28:47 UTC 2011
There have been quite a few changes so we will have one more release
candidate:  Slackware 13.37 RC 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716.
Very close now!  But we'll likely hold out for 2.6.37.6.

Well there you have it. The answer you all have been looking for, all that time! 😉

The list of changes is again pretty long. It shows that “declaring a Release Candidate” has a good reason. People ask from time to time, why these release candidates? Thy are nothing similar to what the bigger distros use in their progression towards a stable release. Things like “feature freeze” and “show stopper bugs” are used in Slackware development too, but you won’t see those mentioned in the ChangeLog. They are not relating one-to-one to any of the Release Candidates. Instead, the first call of a Slackware Release Candidate causes many people to try and install Slackware-current for the first time in a development cycle. Not many people are anxious to use a development release, especially since all of us keep repeating “when you are running -current, we expect that you know what you are doing, and that you are able to fix a suddenly broken system by yourself (with the help of the community)“. The Release Candidates are a sign of stability for those people. And we need all of you to help with the final stage of development! All these new people testing the pre-release result in many bugs found and forgotten features requested, and this causes a surge in the stabilization process which makes Slackware the rock solid distro we all know.

Multilib fans (slackware64), pay attention!

A new kernel again (2.6.37.5) and as the ChangeLog.txt says, there will likely be one more before the final release of Slackware 13.37. This means, you get a recompiled multilib version of glibc from me – and there will be another recompile if we see yet another kernel update.

Grab the updated multilib glibc packages from the usual locations:

Enjoy! Eric