Patrick Volkerding has announced the start of testing of the second release candidate for the Slackware 15.0 distribution. The proposed release, Patrick suggests, should be seen as being in a deeper state of freezing and free from bugs when trying to rebuild from source. An installation image has been prepared for download, 3.3 GB in size (x86_64), as well as a reduced assembly for running in Live mode.
Compared to the previous test release, the python-markdown-3.3.4-x86_64-3.txz package has been rebuilt to fix the Samba build. As Patrick explains, newer versions of Markdown require mportlib_metadata and zipp, and adding them also fixes the build, but oddly enough, the installed PKG-INFO shows version 0.0.0. After trying to rebuild all the other Python modules to try and see if a more general bug had crept in, only two Python modules were found that exhibited this problem, and other similar problem reports (but no fixes) were found. Markdown-3.3.4 seems like a win-win.
In addition, the python-documenttils-0.17.1-x86_64-3.txz package was rebuilt and the qpdf-10.4.0-x86_64-1.txz and bind-9.16.23-x86_64-1.txz packages were updated. libdrm has reverted to version 2.4.107 because version 2.4.108 doesn't seem to be fully compatible with xorg-server-1.20.13 and it also fixes the inability to build xf86-video-vmware from source. In general, the Slackware 15 branch is notable for updating software versions, including the transition to the Linux 5.13 kernel, the GCC 11.2 compiler set, and the Glibc 2.33 system library. Desktop components have been updated to KDE Plasma 5.23 and KDE Gear 21.08.2.
Source: opennet.ru