Saturday 28 July 2018

This Week's Slackware Development Updates in Review

The list of updates this week seems longer than it is. There were two kernel upgrades this week and at this pace if you're not checking and upgrading every day you might as well have skipped the one to Linux 4.14.57. To me there is no point applying kernel updates every few days but it's nice to know we're on the edge of long-term stability here and that they are made available in current as soon as. Great stuff, and Slackware development is certainly active. There's also more news from the master re. his financial situation. It goes without saying that buying from the Slackware store thinking one would support Patrick with this is not recommended anymore.

Fri Jul 27 21:01:22 UTC 2018
Hey folks, my first order of business here needs to be a huge thank you to
everyone who has donated at https://paypal.me/volkerdi to help keep this
project going. As most of you are already aware by now, the financal situation
here at Slackware HQ has not been great for many years, including not getting
any pay for the last two years and forcing me (and my family) to live very
frugally while I continued to work on the project hoping I'd figure out a way
to actually monitize it by the time that Slackware 15.0 is ready for release.
I'm not trying to cast any blame regarding the situation. Really, I can only
blame myself for not trying to build my own ship years ago when things began
to not really work out. I'm still looking into sustainable funding options
such as Patreon or Liberapay (or perhaps both), and I'm open to other ideas.
I'm no longer in immediate danger of going broke, and I'm no longer
entertaining the notion of joining my friends at the local potato chip factory
in order to pay my bills. :) My family is grateful and humbled by the support
we've received. Hope we'll be able to keep this project going for a long time.
Also, I realize that the website lacks updates and needs attention and I will
need to find some time to devote to that. I've never been much of a website
designer, and the slackware.com site is basically left over from work done by
former Walnut Creek / BSDi employees. I've never seen able to make much sense
of the SQL backend. The interface to edit and post articles is clunky (and
I'm not sure the PHP for that even works any more). When I've posted articles
in recent years, I've done so by editing the main page already processed from
PHP into HTML, which is pretty darn messy as I'm sure you can imagine. I tend
to prioritize the distribution itself over other demands on my time - that's
clearly a lot to do with how things ended up the way they did.
So, I guess that's the report for now. Lots more work to do and not enough
time to do it in... that part I don't see changing moving forward. :)
Thanks very much again. I'll do my best to keep you all posted.
       - Pat
a/file-5.34-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-firmware-20180727_b01151b-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-generic-4.14.58-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-huge-4.14.58-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-modules-4.14.58-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-brig-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-g++-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-gfortran-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-gnat-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-go-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/gcc-objc-8.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/kernel-headers-4.14.58-x86-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/libtool-2.4.6-x86_64-9.txz: Rebuilt.
       Recompiled to update embedded GCC version number.
k/kernel-source-4.14.58-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
       CRASH_DUMP n -> y
       KEXEC n -> y
       +KEXEC_JUMP y
       +PROC_VMCORE y
l/babl-0.1.54-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/gegl-0.4.6-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/libart_lgpl-2.3.21-x86_64-2.txz: Removed.
       This actually hasn't been needed by any Slackware package since koffice in
       KDE3, and this particular version won't work with the Trinity Desktop
       Environment, which is essentially a fork of KDE 3.5 updated to compile and
       run with modern libraries and development tools. I can't see much point in
       keeping it around. Thanks to _gin.
n/NetworkManager-1.12.2-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
n/dhcpcd-7.0.7-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
x/libinput-1.11.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
extra/tigervnc/tigervnc-1.9.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
isolinux/initrd.img: Rebuilt.
kernels/*: Upgraded.
usb-and-pxe-installers/usbboot.img: Rebuilt.
+--------------------------+
Wed Jul 25 03:50:17 UTC 2018
a/kernel-generic-4.14.57-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-huge-4.14.57-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-modules-4.14.57-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/shadow-4.2.1-x86_64-5.txz: Rebuilt.
       adduser: added "input" to additional user groups. Thanks to stormtracknole.
a/sysvinit-scripts-2.1-noarch-14.txz: Rebuilt.
       Handle remote (NFS, etc.) mounts with spaces in the name. Thanks to upnort.
d/kernel-headers-4.14.57-x86-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/parallel-20180722-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/rust-1.27.2-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/subversion-1.10.2-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
k/kernel-source-4.14.57-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/libgphoto2-2.5.19-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/libzip-1.5.1-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt.
       Make sure that the API-CHANGES file is included in the package documentation.
x/xf86-video-r128-6.11.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
x/xorg-server-1.20.0-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
       Applied some patches that other distributions have been using for a while:
       Fix glamor so that the return value from glamor_fds_from_pixmap matches
       what's expected (thanks to Darth Vader for pointing out these patches).
       Autobind secondary GPUs to the master as output sink / offload source. This
       seems like a beneficial patch until/unless DEs start to handle this.
       For nvidia cards, if they are GeForce 8 or newer use the modesetting driver
       by default. Seems to be recommmended by upstream where they indicate that
       fixes going into nouveau are primarily to target older cards for legacy
       support and that the modesetting ddx is preferable for newer ones:
       https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94844
x/xorg-server-xephyr-1.20.0-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
x/xorg-server-xnest-1.20.0-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
x/xorg-server-xvfb-1.20.0-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
isolinux/initrd.img: Rebuilt.
       Use ter-v14v.psf.gz as the consolefont. It supports more character sets, and
       the larger font was causing wraparound on UEFI (at least on bare metal here).
kernels/*: Upgraded.
usb-and-pxe-installers/usbboot.img: Rebuilt.
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