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Robby Workman Answers 13 Questions on the Occasion of Slackware-13.1 Release

Published: May 30, 2010

Dear fellow Slackers! We are happy to publish an interview with Robby Workman, a Slackware developer and one of the mainainers of the SlackBuilds.org project, he has kindly given us on the occasion of the Slackware-13.1 release. Enjoy! (A much earlier interview can be found here.)

Dear Robby:
Many congratulations on the release of Slackware 13.1, and thank you for the hard-work and time you have spent to making it all possible. We always greatly appreciate your enthusiasm, diligence and hard-work that you put into every Slackware release.

Mikhail Zotov and I (Ayaz Ahmed Khan), editors at The Slack World, are planning on publishing a series of interviews with the people who make Slackware releases possible. This time around, in light of the release of Slackware 13.1, we have prepared a list of "13" questions that we would be happy to ask you. :) We would be immensely grateful if you could take out some time from your busy schedules to answer the questions.

And now, the 13 questions:
0. One can read in README.TXT and PACKAGES.TXT which programs are included in any release of Slackware. We believe words like gcc-4.4.4 do not say much if anything for a mere mortal Slacker though. Thus, our first question is: what do you think are the most remarkable features of Slackware-13.1 and what do they bring to a "home Slacker" and to a guru of the visible Slackverse?

13.1 was intended as more of a "let's polish 13.0" release as opposed to "here's some new features" release, so ideally, there's not a whole bunch of user-visible changes in it. That being said, there's the addition of polkit that might be noticeable in some cases while using kde; there's the new bluetooth stack (bluez4) that is greatly improved in some respects but does have some regressions for some users; there are some enhancements to Xorg and Xfce (and obviously KDE) that should offer improved stability and some minor new functionality—as an example, you might notice some new notification popups in Xfce...

1. Still, there were an incredible number of updates since release 13.0: the kernel evolved from version 2.6.29.6 to 2.6.33.4, gcc changed from 4.3.3 to 4.4.4, gtk+2 updated from version 2.14.7 to 2.18.9, the X.org system passed through a huge update, there were multiple updates in KDE and other applications and libraries. A number of new packages were added. With all these immense updates of the distribution since release 13.0, what was the most difficult part of preparing Slack-13.1 personally for you?

The bluez4 stuff gave me the most trouble, mainly because blueman made some assumptions about the system on which it was installed, and some of those assumptions weren't valid here. As with most cases, the solutions turned out to be quite simple for the most part, but it's sometimes hard to see that until it's all complete.

After typing that, I now recall that the update of LVM2 was actually more problematic, as we moved from letting the lvm/dm programs manage their own device nodes to letting udev handle that (which is what udev is supposed to do). There's still some disagreement between the two upstream projects as to how certain things are best handled, and trying to figure out who's (more) correct, and more importantly, if the more correct way is the best way right now, was a bit difficult at times. In fact, we shipped with what will probably turn out to be the less correct solution with respect to setting STARTUP in the udev environment on boot, but it's spurred some new discussion between the upstream projects, so hopefully they'll reach a good consensus soon and we can all be happy for Slackware 14.0 :-)

2. Is there anything you had meant to implement in Slack-13.1 but had to postpone for the future? If yes, what was that and why was it postponed?

There's always more, but let's not spoil the surprise :-)

3. What sort of hardware do you have there running under the hood? The "-j7" flag in many of the SlackBuild scripts hints of the use of a fast machine. It would be very interesting to know what kind of hardware you guys use. Do you employ multi-boot machines?

As you know, all of the official packages are built by Volkerding on his hardware, and he has some beefier setups than I do. My devel box has an AMD X2 6000+ with 8 GB of RAM, and aside from serving a couple of printers to the local LAN, it hosts various virtual machines (the latest -stable releases, -current, 11.0) using VirtualBox and armedslack using qemu. I do a lot of testing on my laptop (it's perpetually in an inconsistent state), but the formal testing packages and such are always built in virtual machines.

4. Is there anything in Slack you would like to change significantly? If yes, what is this and why do you want this?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything. Incremental changes are easier anyway :-)

5. The Slackware Package Browser, hosted at packages.slackware.it, is going through an overhaul for a while now. Are there any updates on the progress? When do you think it will be available for the public to use?

Sorry, I don't know.

6. Do you ever try any distributions based on Slackware, e.g., Zenwalk or Salix? Do you like any of the ideas implemented there (for example, automated package management)?

Aside from OpenBSD (and Windows at work), I haven't used another operating system at all in a long time, so no. I do read the release announcements (and occasionally their release notes and errata) of many other distributions, but rarely do I see anything that I can't live without :-)

7. In reviews that appear after any new release of Slackware, one can often find complaints about missing dependency hell in the existing system of package management in Slack. Just of curiosity, have you ever discussed a possibility of implementing an optional check of package dependencies? With a tool like depfinder, this doesn't seem very difficult to implement.

If it's not very difficult to implement, then someone should do it and offer it to the community. Once that happens, then I might have a look at it. As it stands, I happen to think that complaints of "missing dependency hell" are rooted in expecting Slackware to work like $other_distro, and those individuals should just use $other_distro instead. Ultimately, I don't recall ever having any real problems with missing dependencies, and before anyone brings the "but you're an advanced user" argument to the table, I have to point out that I've not always been an advanced user—I was a brand new linux using in 2004, and I started with Slackware; even then, I don't recall experiencing anything remotely similar to a "missing dependency hell." IMHO, that is because I didn't approach my Slackware experience expecting it to do things that it wasn't designed to do—instead, I learned how Slackware works and used it that way.

8. Do you personally use Slackware on laptops? Do you think Slackware is suited well for running on laptops? The major issues we are aware of seem to revolve around WiFi and resume/suspend/hibernate support. How well do you think Slackware fares with regards to these and other overall challenges that any Linux distribution faces when run on a laptop?

I've had Slackware on several laptops, from an old Thinkpad T30, to a T41, and now on a T400. My experience with those has been wonderful; all of them had 100% hardware support from Slackware.

In my experience, almost all of the wireless issues and suspend/resume support problems are from flaky/nonexistent drivers in the kernel. This sounds a bit harsh, but the best solution to that problem is to vote with your wallet—there's a reason all of my laptops have been Thinkpads.

9. Why do you think relics like amp and xv are still kept in Slack? Is there a text editor you would like to see included in Slack?

Re: amp and xv, I'd guess because they still work for some people, and they're not hurting anything being included.

Re: text editor, we already include two vi implementations—should we add nvi too? ;-)

10. What do you think about the way Linux in general is evolving? Is there anything you miss or are not satisfied with?

I probably shouldn't comment on that. :-)

11. Can you tell us about your personal duties/impact in the development of Slackware-13.1

Well, each of us has our own niche areas that we tend to more or less maintain along the way, but sometimes they change—as an example, I did a bit of work with KDE early on (you might recall the kde-4.0.0 stuff), but I pretty much lost interest later (after all, I'm an Xfce guy) and so Eric picked that up and ran with it. He actually uses KDE, so he notices issues that I wouldn't have ever caught, and the result is a much better KDE package set than I would have produced. As another example, PiterPUNK has traditionally maintained udev and friends, but since it was so tightly integrated in the LVM2 changes that I was working on, I ended up handling almost all of the tweaks to udev this time. Anyway, the user-visible stuff that was mostly handled by me during this cycle were bluez and xorg.

12. And, in the end, is there anything you'd like to tell Slackers about that we didn't dare ask?

No lemons were harmed in the creation of this operating system.

Thank you very much, Robby! Have the best of luck in all your activities!


http://slackworld.berlios.de/2010/robby-workman-on-slackware-13.1.html

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