Status and Roadmap

Status and Roadmap

slacker is in beta / work-in-progress. It is usable and tested, but evolving. It is not released yet: until Slackware 16.0 it targets the development branch only, and it will be released with 16.0.

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Where it runs

Target	Status
Development branch (64-bit, x86_64)	builds and runs - for testers
Development branch (32-bit, i586/i686)	builds and runs - for testers (new in 0.9.0, live-validated)
Slackware 16.0	the first official release of slacker will be built for it
Slackware 15.0 (any arch)	not built for it, and never will be

Test builds at https://forge.slackware.nl/rizitis/slacker/releases.

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What works today

• Full slackpkg action parity plus slackpkg+-style multi-repo priority.
• The strict priority model - no silent migration, no downgrade. See Repositories and Priority.
• mirror/<subpath> URLs and the subtree flag for extra/testing/patches.
• Honours repo-declared dependencies when a repo provides them - a package's .dep, or the PACKAGE REQUIRED: field - same-repo, recursive, never guessed, and off-switchable. See Dependencies.
• Repo-declared conflicts and suggests - a third-party package's declared CONFLICTS prompts before install (continue / remove the conflict first / abort); a SUGGESTS line is shown verbatim and never acted on. See Dependencies.
• GPG verification, trust-on-first-use key pinning, and the quarantine model. See Security.
• The history command - a package-change timeline from the pkgtools admin dirs, covering changes by any tool. See Package History.
• Blacklist with glob or regex / series/ / @repo scoping, add and remove (frozen / unfrozen, exact-literal removal). See Blacklist.
• Parallel downloads (MAX_PARALLEL, best-effort: a failed download is skipped, never aborting the batch; a failed GPG/checksum is never installed).
• revert-pkg - roll an official package back to a previous -current version from the cumulative archive, GPG-verified, -current-only. See Commands.
• Mirror freshness + find-mirror - status flags a mirror that has fallen behind the upstream master, and find-mirror probes the official mirror list to rank the fastest up-to-date mirrors for your location (it runs even before a mirror is configured). See Commands.
• Distribution upgrade (upgrade-dist) - migrate a whole system to a new Slackware release, re-pointing the mirror and repos and replacing every package, with a release-guard for normal installs. It is meant for the release jumps from 16.0 onwards; the allowed routes are added with 16.0. The network path has been run end-to-end on a test VM; the local-source path (DISTRO_UPGRADE_MIRROR) is implemented but not yet tested. See Distribution Upgrade.
• Release-match guard - normal install/upgrade refuse a package from a repo built for a different release than the running system (a foot-gun a signature cannot catch); --yes overrides, upgrade-dist is exempt. See Security.
• Templates, clean-system, clean-cache, new-config, and the rest of the 38 actions. See Commands.
• slacker-gui - a GTK4/libadwaita front-end shipped in the same package. It runs the slacker binary and shows its output; read-only views run as the user, changes run as root through polkit (pkexec), and slacker's own questions are answered in the window.

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Ideas on the horizon

These are explored or planned, not promised:

• Richer "why was this kept?" output in upgrade/clean plans (showing the protecting source + priority inline).
• Tabular output for the few commands that still use single-line output.

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Contributing and feedback

• Issues / feature requests: https://forge.slackware.nl/rizitis/slacker/issues
• Hacking on it: see Contributing.
• Packaging it: see Building and Releasing.

Because slacker runs as root and touches your installed system, please test new features in --dry-run first, and report anything surprising - encoding quirks, arch edge cases, and paging behaviour are exactly the things that need real-box testing.