Fire in the hole! Damn the torpedoes.

With 281 new lines in the ChangeLog.txt, this update to slackware-currrent can be called a big one.

But the real interesting stuff is not just those sheer number of updated packages – it’s the new 4.1.6 Linux kernel, the gcc 4.9.3 compiler suite, glibc 2.22 C libraries, mesa 10.6.4,  a new libepoxy package which was required to get glamor 1.0.0 into the xorg-server… exciting times for the adventurous who are running slackware-current!

A note about mesa: it refuses to compile on 32-bit Slackware unless the ARCH is set to i586… gone is the i486 compatibility. Well, if you had watched the ChangeLog.txt these past months you’d already have noticed that updated packages  switched from i486 to i586, but that was voluntary. Mesa is the first real stumbling block.

I am in the process of upgrading my slackware64-current virtual machine and will compile new packages for the multilib gcc and glibc versions… you have to be patient a bit. You can of course go ahead and upgrade to the latest slackware-current, overwriting gcc and glibc with the official versions. All you lose is the ability to run 32-bit programs until my packages are ready. Should not take more than a day.

Pat also warned me about the upgrades to nettle and gnutls. They are likely to break many 3rd party packages because of the change in library version. Please report any broken package from my own repository, so that I can release rebuilt and fixed versions ASAP. Also, libelf was replaced with elfutils but a copy of libelf.so.0 was added to the aaa_elflibs package to keep the breakage to a minimum.

All this info is thanks to Pat who commented on this upgrade verbosely – it is background information MoZes needs for his slackwarearm, and important for my multilib.

Have fun! Eric