Another big update to slackware-current today.

The ChangeLog.txt entry of “Thu Oct 29 20:12:14 UTC 2015” counts 448lines, and a little less than half of that number consists of updates to packages; the rest is rebuilds. A massive package recompilation occured because several core libraries got updated and Pat is quite conscientious in getting all the library dependency issues resolved properly.

Items of interest: this batch contains several security updates (gvfs, jasper, curl, ntp, php, mozilla-firefox).

The kernel got updated (from 4.1.6 to 4.1.12)! Perl was refreshed too (to 5.22.0 coming from 5.18.1). Scons got added. And ConsoleKit2 got added too folks! This replaces the unmaintained ConsoleKit.

The GTK/GLib subsystem got overhauled thanks to the hard work of Robby. And then there’s Mesa which is now at 11.0.4 accompanied by X.Org 1.17.3 and libdrm 2.4.65.

In the KDE department, several components were updated to their most recent releases: KDEvelop is now at version 4.7.2, Calligra went up to 2.9.8. The various Long Term Support (LTS) packages are now at their final versions: kdelibs to 4.14.13, kdepim* to 4.14.10 and kde-workspace to 4.11.22. No further updates for KDE 4 are expected.

All in all a potentially disruptive update. I suggest that you upgrade with care, especially if you are running my Plasma 5 packages. I have not yet had the time to test whether recompilations are required, and I am pressed for time (delivering training courses to a new Helpdesk team this week and the next) so it may take several more days before I can come up with rebuilt Plasma packages.

If you want to dive right in and report the Plasma 5 packages that no longer work for you, I’d be grateful.

Have fun! Eric