Ever since the birth of 64-bit Slackware in 2009, I have been maintaining a multilib repository. Today, 15 years later, things are changing!
You may know it or not, depending on your age, but I have created 64-bit Slackware from scratch late 2008 and early 2009 as a project to deal with an inguinal hernia which was really painful, and the subsequent surgery caused me to be stuck to a bed for a while. I re-wrote the SlackBuild for every package in Slackware, and created SlackBuild scripts for a whole lot of other packages that had nothing more than a ‘build’ script. I also wrote all scripts in such a way that they were capable of building 32-bit and 64-bit Slackware from the same source. Pat would not have accepted the burden of having to maintain two trees instead of one.
Not everybody needs a multilib setup, but historically there has been a need, particularly to be able to run old proprietary programs that were available only as 32-bit binaries. And then there’s the whole Microsoft Windows ecosystem of 32-bit commercial programs and games, to be run in emulators such as Wine and a platform like Steam.
I had setup the 64-bit Slackware to be “multilib-ready”. It was a pure 64-bit system but by swapping a few packages (glibc and gcc) and adding a 32-bit compatibility layer, the 64-bit Slackware would be able to run and compile 32-bit binaries. That process has always been reversible too.
Pat was clear about his own goals: he wanted the new platform to be a pure 64-bit Slackware when he was going to publish it. I had no problem with that, and thus alien’s multilib repository was born.
As said, this worked extremely well for the past 15 years. Pat would give me a heads-up whenever he was planning an upgrade to either the gcc or glibc packages, so that I would have time to prepare my own multilib versions and could release those on the heels of the official Slackware update.
Lately, Pat and me discussed our multilib collaboration occasionally and I saw his opinion shift bit-wise 🙂
Today, Pat has pushed an update to Slackware-current which effectively merges my multlib versions of gcc and glibc SlackBuild scripts with the official distro versions. This means that my own gcc and glibc multilib packages are obsolete, and I have removed them from the ‘current’ directory of the multilib repository.
In 64-bit Slackware-current you finally have multilib-capable gcc and glibc packages! All you need to add to Slackware64 now is my collection of ‘compat32’ packages. And if you want, use the massconvert32.sh script in my compat32-tools package to create these ‘compat32’ packages yourself. It does not involve any compilation – all that happens is that some official Slackware 32-bit packages are downloaded, cleaned-up a bit and then re-packaged into ‘-compat32’ versions.
Thanks Pat!
Remember the date! On May 18th of 2020, PAM got added to the Slackware-current core. In case that makes you worry, wonder or causes you to ponder leaving Slackware behind, don’t let this change scare you. PAM has come a long way, it is safe and in Slackware, it is not getting in your way. You won’t have to change a single thing to your computer except installing three new packages (slackpkg install-new) before you reboot. Adding PAM should finally remove the self-imposed writer’s block in Patrick’s mind and open the path to long-awaited renewals in the KDE and XFCE areas.
The GCC compiler suite in slackware-current got a major version bump last week in a 
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