Slackware 13.0 released, Kongoni 2.13.0 development begins.

We haven’t had much major news on the Kongoni front recently, largely because with a stable release out there and the upstream not ready for the next cycle, there wasn’t really much interesting happening for a while. Just steady growth and enhancement.

That changes today with big news from upstream meaning the next major kongoni wave has started. I sent the following mail about it to both the devel and announce-list and thought I would repost it here. As this major work begins, expect to see the weekly development newsletters resume – as always – every Friday until we finish stable.

Just to clarify – we continue to maintain and support the 1.12.2 release’s tree, the new current tree will become 2.13.0 – but will be a separate tree so that we can continue to provide bugfixes and crucial support where needed for 12.2 users for as long as practical.

——–

Hi all,
First off, can I ask one of the webmasters to do us a nice write-up
from this mail, the slackware.com announcement and whatever other
relevant sources you want for the website ? Some of the information in
this mail is crucial to our users as well.

The crux is, slackware 13.0 is finally released stable. This means
that we will now start the development cycle of Kongoni 2.13.0 – with
work beginning on a first alpha. This could take a bit of time because
there is a lot of major changes from 12.2. As of the next few days
kongoni-current will begin to track slackware-13 and this means that
clean upgrading will likely be broken for a while, particularly on
64-bit as we will be switching from bluewhite64 upstream to
slackware64 upstream.
As we find and fix incompatibilities the upgrade-path will become ever
cleaner and as it stabilizes we will begin to put together ISO’s.

One other change from earlier plans is that I will not switch to
upstream KDE packages after all. The reason for this is that I would
like kongoni to continue to track the KDE monthly point releases
which, at this stage, it seems slackware will not do (in fact, kongoni
is already ahead of slackware 13 which released KDE4.2.4 while we
already ahve 4.3.0)

So I would highly recommend that only developers follow
kongoni-current until further notice as it almost certainly will be
broken for a while.

The final decision to make here is to name the new alpha in
development, as always – everyone can make suggestions and we’ll have
a vote. I would like to propose one of my personal favorites, the
classic roman philosopher who gave us the quote “All generalizations
are false” – Cicero.