Decision Made for Next Slackware Release

After hearing thoughts from some Slackware users in this thread, Pat has finally decided on the three vital components of any Linux distributions: kernel, GCC, and XOrg. Here are his decision:

1. Stick with Linux Kernel 3.8.x (for now). Newer kernel brings better support for newer hardware and it does fix some issues that people experienced on their machine, especially with Ivy Bridge processors from Intel. However, a revert is still possible if nVidia 6150SE and nouveau remains to be broken, even with driver blobs as well. Pat decided to bump to Linux Kernel 3.8.8 until further updates.
2. Keep GCC 4.8.x branch as he finds no breakeage with this version of GCC. A change in the compiler is inevitable, but hopefully upstream applications will have to adapt with the changes in GCC as well, so we should have a cleaner source code and less time in working on a patch to make it compilable with GCC 4.8.0. For now, most of the problem can be sorted out by removing -Werror on the Makefile on the troubled package.
3. XOrg downgraded to 1.13.4 for main packages and for those who needed a more bleeding edge system should go with XOrg 1.14.1 available on testing/. I believe this is a good decision by Patrick as he provided two XOrg packages and still pick up the stable version which works with most systems. Those who needed to work with newer XOrg can opt to use the packages provided in testing/. Please note that other XOrg-related packages should also use the same version.

Besides the above changes, several changes are also happening on -Current:

• Glibc patched to fix a low priority security vulnerabilities
• Proftpd is now configured to include mod_radius
• Added /etc/auto.master.d in autofs package

The thread has been closed, but since the development is still ongoing, you can add more comments for future references if the changes on -Current broke your system or if you have other good suggestions.

Happy Testing :)