Closing on 2017
It's almost the end of the year 2017 and things are looking great for Slackware development as -current gets more mature everyday with contributions from many people. It's not yet considered Alpha or Beta 1 yet, but if you look at the CHANGES_AND_HINTS, you will notice a lot of packages gets added in this cycle (rust, meson, python3, SDL2, FFmpeg, libwebp, libsodium, libinput, vulkansdk, dovecot, libbluray, and xorriso are some of the big one) and we also have ash -> dash, slocate -> mlocate, man -> man-db, sendmail -> postfix and tetex -> texlive substitution. Almost all of my wishlist (except for the last two by the time i wrote this few days before it was scheduled to be posted while i am away) are now included in -current as well (i hope they will all get approved for Slackware 15.0). With Patrick being more active in LQ, more reports are coming in on this thread (now changed into a new thread). Issues gets found quickly and resolved in short time.
Meanwhile, KDE has just released their KDE Applications 17.12 that gets rid of KDE 4 completely. Eric Hameleers has been working on that and he has posted on his blog about his work. A new LiveSlack ISO is also available as well with all those changes. He is currently working on testing wayland on top of Slackware-Current and i think he has nailed it with his progress in November. More tweaks are still needed to makes every applications are working well, but overall it's working already.
MATE developers have decided to loosen the release schedule to one release per year instead of two, which was following Ubuntu release cycle. By having longer release schedule, the developers has more time to provide bug fix releases as they did with 1.18.x at this moment. In the past, stable releases are only supported for a short time since they need to prepare for next release, causing some features not yet implemented. They are planning to release MATE 1.20 in January (unless there's a delay) but it will not be possible to install it on top of Slackware 14.2 since they have raised the GTK+3 version requirements. It enables them to remove old codes and also fix many bugs that happened only with older GTK+3 releases.
SBo project is also kicking in 2017. Based on some statistics, we had more than 9600 commits alone this year coming from more than 300 contributors and a total of 6868 scripts for 14.2 repository. We also had a new machine replacing the old server which was coming from donations from our users and sponsors. The new servers is way more powerful than the previous one and it enables us to serve users with more resources with better infrastructure.
sbopkg is still alive and there's some new features included in the master branch already which should make sqg LOT faster, thanks to Marcel Saegebarth for his contributions. You will need to install parallel to get the best of sqg in the next release. Basically it allows you to maximize your machine's CPUs to generate all the queue files. On my new Ryzen machine which has 6 (+6) cores, i test it using time sqg -a -j 24 and i can complete the whole process in 67 seconds.
We are now looking forward toward 2018 and hoping that it could be a better year for all open source projects, especially Slackware-related projects.
Meanwhile, KDE has just released their KDE Applications 17.12 that gets rid of KDE 4 completely. Eric Hameleers has been working on that and he has posted on his blog about his work. A new LiveSlack ISO is also available as well with all those changes. He is currently working on testing wayland on top of Slackware-Current and i think he has nailed it with his progress in November. More tweaks are still needed to makes every applications are working well, but overall it's working already.
MATE developers have decided to loosen the release schedule to one release per year instead of two, which was following Ubuntu release cycle. By having longer release schedule, the developers has more time to provide bug fix releases as they did with 1.18.x at this moment. In the past, stable releases are only supported for a short time since they need to prepare for next release, causing some features not yet implemented. They are planning to release MATE 1.20 in January (unless there's a delay) but it will not be possible to install it on top of Slackware 14.2 since they have raised the GTK+3 version requirements. It enables them to remove old codes and also fix many bugs that happened only with older GTK+3 releases.
SBo project is also kicking in 2017. Based on some statistics, we had more than 9600 commits alone this year coming from more than 300 contributors and a total of 6868 scripts for 14.2 repository. We also had a new machine replacing the old server which was coming from donations from our users and sponsors. The new servers is way more powerful than the previous one and it enables us to serve users with more resources with better infrastructure.
sbopkg is still alive and there's some new features included in the master branch already which should make sqg LOT faster, thanks to Marcel Saegebarth for his contributions. You will need to install parallel to get the best of sqg in the next release. Basically it allows you to maximize your machine's CPUs to generate all the queue files. On my new Ryzen machine which has 6 (+6) cores, i test it using time sqg -a -j 24 and i can complete the whole process in 67 seconds.
We are now looking forward toward 2018 and hoping that it could be a better year for all open source projects, especially Slackware-related projects.