My personal and professional life

2018-06-12

Is it time for Slackware 15?

Last Slackware release (14.2) appeared almost 2 years ago and upgraded many packages, but things are moving faster nowadays, so I just wonder isn't it time for a new release? I'm following -current, so I already see some notable changes and upgrades accumulating there, including:
  • Base system:
    • Linux Kernel 4.14 LTS;
    • GNU C Library 2.27;
  • Servers:
    • Postfix 3.3 (replacing Sendmail as MTA) and Dovecot 2.3 (replacing imapd as IMAP daemon);
    • Apache 2.4.33 (with HTTP/2 support);
    • ProFTPD 1.3.6 (with mod_sftp and mod_facl support);
    • Samba 4.6;
    • MariaDB 10.3.7 (very nice given what I recently wrote about new functionalities);
    • Bind 9.11, dhcp 4.3.4, ntp 4.2.8p11 (now running as ntp:ntp) and more;
  • Development:
    • GNU's Compiler Collection 7.3 and LLVM 6.0;
    • Perl 5.26, PHP 7.2, Python 3.6, Ruby 2.5 and Rust 1.26;
    • Git 2.17 and Mercurial 4.5;
  • GUI:
    • X.Org 1.20;
    • KDE 4.14.36 (I was hoping for Plasma 5.x though);
    • SeaMonkey 2.49, Firefox 59.0 and Thunderbird 52.8;
    • GTK+ applications such as Pidgin 2.13, Gimp 2.10, etc.
There are 66 new packages in total among them FFmpeg 3.4, new libraries like opus, lame, libbluray, speex, id3lib, libwebp and various Python modules (e.g. docutils, idna and six), which I already have on SlackPack. I noted also SDL2 library, which I do not have and which is nice, because some packages already need it.
There are many new packages I was waiting like Postfix, Dovecot, Python 3, MariaDB 10.3, GCC 7.3, which should make a great new release whichever and whenever it's going to be. The only disappointment for me is that KDE is still 4.14 and Qt 4.8, but some applications already need KDE 5 and Qt 5 (e.g. like KDESvn, cppcheck's GUI, etc.).
Package pkgtools is already 15.0 in -current, so is it time for Slackware 15?

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