Slackware Package Delta Summaries

I put together a quick script for summarizing the differences between Slackware releases based on the versions of some packages.

I only included packages I care about, which might not be the packages you care about. See the CARE_LIST list in the script source (perl) to see how much you care about these deltas.

The difference summaries can be viewed here (last updated 2017-09-06):
Slackware64 13.1 vs Slackware64 13.37
Slackware64 13.37 vs Slackware64 14.0
Slackware64 14.0 vs Slackware64 14.1 (as of 2015-01-22)
Slackware64 14.0 vs Slackware64 14.1 (as of 2015-04-24)
Slackware64 14.1 vs Slackware64 14.2 (as of 2017-09-06)
Slackware64 14.2 vs Slackware64 current (as of 2017-09-06)

The summaries of the summaries are tabulated here, for convenience:

			sum of version level deltas
releases compared	date compared	packages changed (of 268)	major	minor	patch
Slackware64 13.1 vs 13.37	2015-01-22	158	15	275	211
Slackware64 13.37 vs 14.0	2015-01-22	153	31	167	274
Slackware64 14.0 vs 14.1	2015-01-22	147	23	161	190
Slackware64 14.1 vs 14.2	2017-09-06	194	43	350	262
Slackware64 14.2 vs current	2017-09-06	141	19	203	237

What the script does is parse the PACKAGES.TXT files included in each Slackware release, extract package names, normalize their versions to a three-number sequence ("major" version, "minor" version, and "patch" version), and group updated packages according to which version in this sequence changed.

Thus, a package was put into a "major change" bucket if its major version number changed, into a "minor change" bucket if its major version did not change but its minor version did change, and into a "patch change" bucket if neither its major nor minor versions changed but its patch version did change. The numbers given are not the number of packages changed, but rather the sum of the differences between the changed version numbers. See the difference summaries linked above for the counts and names of packages which changed in each bucket.

So .. what does this mean? VERY LITTLE! Please don't read too much into this numerology. The next stable release might come out tomorrow, or not for months. I just wrote this up to give myself a sense of the differences between releases, and thought other Slackfolk might find it entertaining. Some of the techniques used to normalize package versions were "creative", and of dubious validity.

If anyone's interested in discussing these meaningless numbers, there's an official Slackware forum on LinuxQuestions where I and other Slackers hang out and talk about stuff. That seems like a good place for it. I also hang out in freenode's ##slackware-help channel.