Running Slackware “Current”

“This is partly the result of Slackware’s philosophy of building
the distribution from unmodified “vanilla” upstream sources, and
partly due the founder’s selective conservatism with regards to
switching to newer, but not well-tested core components, including
the Linux kernel. Despite that, most end-user applications are
highly up-to-date and running Slackware current provides the user
with a modern system with many of the latest applications available
for Linux.

“So if you have a stable Slackware system installed, how to you
switch to the “current” tree? This is somewhat less straightforward
than in other distributions because Slackware doesn’t believe in
dependency-resolving package management systems, so the “proper”
way of doing this would be to download each individual software
package from the current tree and install it with pkgtools. Given
that this tree gets on average 2 – 3 updates per week, some of
which could contain dozens of packages, this would be very time
consuming indeed! Another tempting solution would be the use of
slackpkg, a dependency-resolving package management system that has
recently entered the main Slackware tree after years in the extra
directory. However, this wouldn’t work, since slackpkg updates
installed packages only and will ignore any new ones added to the
“current” tree.”

Complete
Story