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