My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Repository purge coming up soon-ish

After I built a fresh Avidemux (see previous post) I realized how many old packages I still have in my repositories. They are taking up space on many server mirrors.

I have decided that I will start a cleansing process, a purge if you want, of all the older stuff. The reason is not just disk space of course. It’s my realization that there may be vulnerabilities in these old packages that I never addressed; and I really hope that people have migrated their machines to Slackware 14.2 (servers or conservative desktop users) or went with -current (modern desktop users, let’s call those).

From time to time, you need to clean house. I myself am infamous for not throwing away anything… just take a look at my attic. So these packages will be gone from online servers, but live on in my own local package archive.

Because of the time involved (manual checks to ensure that I don’t remove too much by mistake) this will be done in several ‘waves’. My repositories already don’t have packages for Slackware releases older than 13.37 and tomorrow I will purge all packages targeting Slackware 13.37. Later, that will be followed by a purge of all packages for Slackware 14.0, and finally those that were meant for Slackware 14.1 will also be removed. I will stick with package support for Slackware 14.2 (and 15.0 when that gets released) and always -current.

In case you still run one of these older versions of Slackware, you would want to make local copies of the following repositories ASAP:

And also these:

I will leave the multilib repositories (http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ and its mirrors) untouched.

Eric

3 Comments

  1. alienbob

    Local purge is complete. Tomorrow (31 Dec 2021) I will push these updates to the online mirrors.
    All packages that were targeting Slackware 14.1 or older will be removed.
    A total of 158 programs are going to be completely removed from the repo. They were not used since Slackware 14.1.
    If you need any of these removed programs on Slackware 14.2 or later, let me know in the comments section. The complete list will be in the ChangeLog.txt.

  2. Inman

    Hi Eric

    I thought, first asking you this, before reporting to Patrick, do you know why ksysguard is removed from KDE in Slackware current.

    The reason I am asking is that if one uses system monitor widgets, depending on the configurations, it sometimes ends up in a mess that you need to spend at 20 minutes cleaning almost every single plasma config file from system-monitor widget traces, else the whole KDE is worthless, eventually every single window freezes and get black. Even installing the old version of the ksysguard avoids the problem … I am trying to figure out what happens and why the libksysguard is not enough for the job, but still not there to understand what is going on, you cannot even generate a full bug report. Maybe you guys know better, or is it a known issue.

    Cheers
    Inman

    • alienbob

      KDE developers replaced ksysguard with plasma-systemmonitor. There’s nothing we can do about that except you can open bug reports.

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