"Aaron W. Hsu" <
arc...@sacrideo.us> wrote:
> I do not have anything official, but I have to say that I am really
> surprised support for the older versions lasted as long as it did.
Well comparing the support for Slackware 8.0 with Slackware 8.1 it is a
little bit surprising that 8.1 was supported for more than 10 years and
8.0 had almost no support at all.
Maybe what is really missing is some kind of official policy stating the
intention of future support for current and upcoming releases. Looking at
the support for 8.1 it would a few weeks ago be easy to expect support for
13.37 for at least 10 years. Now with this announcement you might expect
13.37 to be supported for five years from release, that would be until
2016/04/28, less than 4 years from now. On the other hand, someone might
make some new decision once Slackware 14 is released that Slackware 13
will no longer be supported...
People using their workstation for development purposes usually want to
give their users or maybe even paying customers some kind of future
support. That future support usually depends upon still being able to run
the same development environment. Not knowing how long you might expect
support for a release makes Slackware less useful as a development
platform.
> As it stands, I do know that the 13.0 and later releases were pretty big
> ones, IMO, and there seems to be a strong difference in those before
> 13.0 and those after.
They were big as it was about a year between each release. However, they
are all, like the 12-releases running kernel 2.6. They haven't made any
major libc switchover like when we switched from libc5 to glibc2 (was it
with Slackware 7?). We still have the same basic naming convention for
packages as we had since Slackware 9 even though the compression was
changed from gzip to xz with Slackware 13.0. We still have the same elf
format for executables that we have had since Slackware 3. Slackware 13
still uses udev to automagically load modules like Slackware 12.
During the years there have been many major improvements to Slackware like
loadable kernel modules for hardware support and later also automating
that with the hotplug daeomn. However, when I compare Slackware 13.1 with
Slackware 12.0 I can only come to think of one minor improvement which
makes me think that 13.1 is a little better than 12.0 and that is the
automounter being able to show the names of directories before they are
being used. There are other parts that differ like KDE4 vs KDE3, but I
wouldn't say that 13 has brought a very big progress compared to Slackware
12.
But I do understand that a distribution like Slackware keeps on growing
with new packages added and old packages growing bigger for each relase.
Maintining more software means more work and might explain both why
releases come less often and why a decision was made cutting support for
many old releases at once.
> It's also a pretty long time for support, if you compare it to the one
> or two years that are the support cycle of most non-enterprise
> distributions.
Yes, I have since I started using Slackware 9.1 considered the long
support to be one big advantages of Slackware compared to other
distributions.