I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

slackpkg doesn't do dependencies.

slapt-get (http://software.jaos.org/) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages.

Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't part of Slackware are listed.

There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from http://slackbuilds.org/, and it resolves dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least).

There's a new repo on http://slackonly.com/ which offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I haven't used it yet.

UPDATE: After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully they'll get better with it soon.

Ah, you're right it was slapt-get that I used; it convinced me that apt-get was really good, part of the reason I moved despite up to then being more familiar with compiling my own (yay for checkinstall) or using yum.

sbotools is the magic dep mgr for slackbuilds

http://dawnrazor.net/sbotools/

slpkg is worth a look:

https://github.com/dslackw/slpkg

> automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment;

It's called DKMS, a Dell project originally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Suppor...

What do you think dependency management would bring to slackware?

I remember, back in 2001 or so, how bad package management was.

yum didn't exist, apt-get was not widely deployed. You were stuck with rpm and dpkg. You should spend a few days forcing yourself to just use those two commands and see how much you hate life.

I used to install systems (up to Mandrake 6.1) via RPM, then give up on package management entirely, in order to compile Enlightenment and GNOME (and much of rawhide!) from source. Eventually, I gave up on installing binaries altogether on these systems, because it was easier to manage upgrades from source.

Now, as a lazy old man, I've switched to gentoo ebuilds, which are glorified scripts that bring just enough dependency management to not get in the way.

I used Slackware for several years as my main desktop machine. I never ran into dependency issues. You have to understand that the Debian et al approach of having dozens of small packages for everything you want to install is not universal.

I have often read "I don't have the time for Slackware." In all honesty, I spent way less time on the OS with Slackware. The quality was much higher, there was never a need to wait months for a bug fix because someone forgot to link something in, and it was really easy to build my own packages.

I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed. But the dependency issue was not a concern at all.

> I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed

I'd be interested to hear more about that if you're willing to share. Let's see if we can do something positive to fix it, even if it's too late to help you personally.

The biggest thing was that SlackBuilds weren't being updated for the new release. There was also some unfriendliness in the mailing list related to getting it fixed (in general, nothing I experienced). I don't remember exactly what it was though. This was quite a while back - probably 13.1 or 13.37.

Thanks. FYI, for the upcoming 14.2 release we have an officially unofficial repo with hundreds of fixes for 14.2 ready to go (and hundreds more needed).

I'll admit I get a little tetchy when people insist on telling me 'xxx is broken on -current' when I already know exactly which 400+ packages are broken, and when everybody should understand that -current is for beta testers.

I'm using slackware (full install) with sbopkg and slackpkg+, and I needed to run a dependency check only once, when a package I already had installed from sbopkg had a new dependency. All other times (2 years) I haven't run in any issue with dependencies, not even once.