* Craig Box <craig(a)dubculture.co.nz> [2005-08-16 09:40]:
I am interested to know what particular aspect of Slackware makes it more inherently stable than any other distribution built using the same components?
The packaging policy, mostly. • At least something like 80% of the packages in Slackware are compiled from unpatched source as they come straight from their authors. Pat refuses to package anything that requires a bunch of patches to make it work acceptably. Compare even to Debian or the like, where packages and their interactions can take a long time to stabilize, in no small part due to the long list of patches applied for very many packages before building. • Pat also won’t enable far-reaching features that haven’t proven themselves in practice. Eg. Slackware has never enabled devfs by default (but offered udev support fairly quickly). It has also never offered PAM support by default – as a result, a slew of OpenSSH security holes never affected Slackware, because they were the result of interactions between OpenSSH and PAM. Pat still follows new versions of software relatively closely. He is just adamant about it being bug-free upstream instead of patching out bugs himself downstream, and he is very conservative about deep changes to the system. The result is a distro which has always been fairly up-to-date (particularly if you follow -current) yet very stable. I actually follow -current pretty much blindly, and I have yet to see any breakage whatsoever from living on the bleeding edge. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>