How to help

Well, my take on the versioning is this:

Version 8 is the older, more finished release. It has an installer that resembles the Slackware installer and functions well enough. Be warned that the software is several releases out of date, so expect feature sets and bugs from years ago. It's an okay release for learning how the system works on SPARC machines, but shouldn't be used for any new development. Hopefully 8 will be phased out when we release 10.

Version 10.0 beta is a small collection of a/ and n/ packages designed for you to bring up a working system and finish installing manually either from -current (was the 10.0 tree) or tree-10.1. You could use it by itself, but I don't think the installation would be too much fun without much of the other software. Think of it as a net-install or rescue disk, but without guided steps.

Splack-current is the mainline target. As of this writing, it contains software roughly the same age as Slackware 9.1 or 10.0. It has most of what you'd expect, but you'll have to scavenge pieces (like the X server and X-apps) from older releases if you want a complete system. The -current branch hasn't seen much activity since fede2 stopped committing.

"tree-10.1" was the working title for the experimental branch I've been building. Everything I did over the last few months "should" be a drop-in replacement for -current. Since it's an independent reinterpretation of the OS, there might be a few library or versioning conflicts moving across branches (from -current to this). I've tried to be as true to Slackware 10.1 as I could be in terms of package completeness, so you'll find most of the easy- and medium-difficulty packages finished. As you can see from the tree-10.1 thread comments by smerik, there's still a few bugs to work out. The entire thing needs to be rehosted at least once. I need to start a changelog. Documentation needs to be finished. Etc, etc, etc.



I'd reccommend giving 8 a try for now. Once you get used to how it works, go ahead and restart with a clean install of 10.0 beta and jump to either -current or tree-10.1.

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