Big Batch in February

An early love gift from Patrick for Slackware users: a big batch of updates. Last update of Slackware was like 2 weeks ago and since then no updates are being pushed, even for security updates while the requests on LQ thread keep coming in.

At last, today is the day you are waiting for. Most of the request are granted and they are now goes public. Many of us will be surprised about the newly packages introduced in this batch. Let's first see the security update:

• php: Upgraded to 5.6.30 for Slackware 14.0 and newer
• openssl: Upgraded to 1.0.2k for Slackware 14.2 and newer
• bind: Upgraded to 9.9.9_P6 for Slackware 13.0  up to 14.1, 9.10.4_P6 for Slackware 14.2, and 9.11.0_P3 for Current
• tcpdump: Upgraded to 4.9.0 for Slackware 13.37 and newer

Now for the new packages introduced in this update:

• opencl-headers: This is header files for OpenCL, can be utilized by mesa to enable GPU computation
• ffmpeg: Swiss army of audio/video editing.
• libclc: Another OpenCL library
• libedit: Command line editor library
• ocl-icd: OpenCL ICD binding
• python-six: Python 2/3 compatibility library

There's also some .so library version bump which should be taken note by users as some packages might get affected by it:

• llvm
• libevent
• iptables
• libvpx

One package gets removed: json-c as it's no longer a dep for pulseaudio and the main reason why it was introduced was due to pulseaudio included in Slackware 14.2.

The rest are just normal package updates:

• grep: Upgraded to 2.28
• hdparm: Upgraded to 9.51
• sed: Upgraded to 4.4
• util-linux: Upgraded to 2.29.1
• ddrescue: Upgraded to 1.22
• flac: Upgraded to 1.3.2
• sqlite: Upgraded to 3.16.2
• scons: Upgraded to 2.5.1
• gmime: Upgraded to 2.6.23
• gstreamer and gst-plugins-{base,good}: Upgraded to 1.10.3
• libjpeg-turbo: Upgraded to 1.5.1
• libnl3: Upgraded to 3.2.29
• libpcap: Upgraded to 1.8.1
• libzip: Upgraded 1.1.3
• pulseaudio: Upgraded to 1.10.0
• rasqal: Upgraded to 0.9.33
• redland: Upgraded to 1.0.17
• serf: Upgraded 1.3.9
• NetworkManager: Upgraded to 1.6.0
• iproute2: Upgraded to 4.9.0
• samba: Upgraded to 4.5.5
• wget: Upgraded to 1.19
• zd1211-firmware: Upgraded to 1.5
• fontconfig: Upgraded to 2.12.1
• libdrm: Upgraded to 2.4.75
• libinput: Upgraded to 1.6.0
• mesa: Upgraded to 13.0.4
• MPlayer: Upgraded to 1.3_20170208
• mozilla-thunderbird: Upgraded to 45.7.1
• network-manager-applet: Upgraded to 1.4.4

Some notes about ffmpeg: it will have limited functionality since it's built against a minimum of dependencies that are included in the stock packages and the configure script doesn't have auto-detect feature, meaning that you will need to pass variables in order to get the deps auto-detected. One user in LQ posted a nice patch to enhance the SlackBuild script so that it will try to enable some features if it found any dependencies in our system. I hope Patrick can include them so it will ease user's job to get the maximum functionality from ffmpeg.

If you used a lot of scripts from SBo repository, there's a big chance that some of your packages will be broken by this update due to shared libraries gets bumped and newer ffmpeg introduced compared to what we have in SBo. Stay tune for patches in Ponce's personal repository.