Slackware 7.2 coming soon – but not today

The Slackware team is gearing up for the next stable release, including important updates such as the 2.2.18 kernel (which includes USB support, DRI, and VM fixes), and glibc2.2. This release has not happened yet, despite what Slashdot reported and later retracted.

The -current tree is awaiting more testing and packages. The kernel of -current was upgraded to 2.2.18 on Thursday, the most recent of many changes and updates to the base 7.1 tree. Changes which haven’t quite settled into a stable release.

The largest potential pitfall to those updating from 7.1 or earlier is that with glibc2.2, the maintainers decided to remove the Berkeley DB support from the code. This means that most apps which require -ldb or -ldb3 for functionality (Postfix, Cyrus IMAPD, etc) break in interesting ways during compilation.

When the distribution is ready, Patrick V. will bless it, and move it to the Slackware-7.2 directory. That’s when the mirrors will have completetly up to date copies, and it’ll be ready for download and installation by the end users.

I received an official mail from Patrick Volkerding confirming that Slackware 7.2 has not been released. “I guess the most important reason that Slackware 7.2 is not released is that it’s not done yet. 🙂 There’s a lot of stuff that’s still on the TODO list. I’d like for 2.4.x to be an _option_ (I’ll still trust 2.2.xx more for quite some time), but 2.4.0 has issues with the USB subsystem not working as modules. […] So, we’re still looking at loose
ends. Seeing “7.2” pop up in a couple of places just indicates that we can all see the light at the end of the tunnel.“

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