The upgrade to Slackware 10.1 seems to have gone smoothly. Once again the major glitch was due to a new version of Perl, which required reinstalling SpamAssassin and a handful of modules from CPAN, thanks to dependencies on a version-specific pathname. And, I had to rebuild a new kernel, since the default generic one didn’t include the RAID support needed for my root partition. (Edit: Oh it also appears to have broken my slrnpull runs by overwriting the config file. That’s partly slrn’s fault for putting a config file under frigging /var instead of /etc though…)
Otherwise though, there’s nothing all that revolutionary about this version of Slackware. Just a bunch of minor version updates of some packages.
So, one might wonder, why am I sticking with Slackware anyway?
Inertia, mostly, I suppose. It’s usually easier to keep doing what you were doing before than to switch to something that could be radically different. Slackware certainly isn’t the easiest distro to use and maintain, involving a lot of manual building and configuration editing, but I’ve been using it ever since I first installed Linux (back when the only choices available were Slack and one other (Yggdrasil?)), so I’m simply used to it by now.
I have tried other distros, but they’ve left me a bit wanting. I briefly used Debian on my XP box when it was dual-booting, but I ran into trouble with the package manager. Trying to select a handful of packages through ‘aptitude’ somehow led to a bunch of broken or conflicting dependencies, and it was frustrating trying to fix it up. I’m sure a Debian expert would have been able to say “Oh, all you had to do was X and Y and everything would have been perfect,” but I simply didn’t care enough at the time and the system eventually got wiped anyway. Slackware simply avoids the dependency mess entirely by not even doing dependency checking and keeping the base system relatively simple and free of complex dependencies.
I’ve also tried Gentoo on my iBook, and it did work fairly well, but building from source is slow, especially on an older box like this server. Updates of common components that required a lot of rebuilding happened a bit too often for a stable server, too, but would have been necessary for a few of the packages I’d need to use.
The lure of better package management, automatic downloads, and wider support is still tempting, and maybe I’ll wind up trying more distros in the future and even switching, but for now I’m still going to stick with Slackware.
Ok. Being the perve I am at times, I had to snicker when I read, “I had some trouble with my package manager.” and there’s always “the lure of better package management” and oh. This one: “..trying to select a handful of packages…” ;-)
Ok. I’m bad. I’ll stop now. :-P
Okay, Jenn’s dirty mind aside… :-)
Have you given thought to one of the RH-like distros, or are package manager-based distros in general off your list? My troubles with MDK’s RPM base has been pretty minimal…
There’s certainly room for experimentation with other distros yet, as I still haven’t tried a lot of them, but they’d have to be on new systems. I’m not going to wipe out this server, reinstall something different, spend a ton of time adapting everything from the old configuration over to the new distro, decide “Nah, I don’t like this” and then have to undo it all, on what is for me a ‘production’ machine. :-)
Oh, hell. Ya don’t need to tell me that; it’s like preaching to the converted. ;-)
I was asking solely out of curiosity and nothing more. The only down side to package-based distros is that when / if you want to compile your own stuff, intermingling it with package installs can get messy — or so I’ve experienced. Since derzon is a production server and hardly something you use for development anyhow, I merely wondered if something like MDK might make it easier to deal with; especially since after the v9.2 release ‘urpmi’ and the software auto-updaters (like MandrakeUpdate) actually work well now.
Just watch out for Perl updates. ;-)