There appear to be a number of tools available for dependency resolution in Slackware, e.g. slapt-get (and gslapt), sbotools (http://dawnrazor.net/sbotools/) and usm (http://sourceforge.net/projects/usm/). Though they are are not in line with main philosophy of Slackware, they appear to be being used commonly. Which of these (or any other) have you found most reliable and useful. Thanks for your insight.

All are to some extent reliable and useful.

But there is a caveat: there will still be some cases where the dependency tool fails, because of some changes in the configure options, the versions used, etc. that the tool can hardly take into account/know of.

Using only genuine Slackware packages is a guarantee that all the components work and fit together.

That doesn't mean that using one of theses tools is forbidden: personally I use sbopkg/sqg very often. But doing so _can_ occasion issues (like e.g. replacing a library shipped in Slackware by another version that could prevent another application to work), so be warned.

You will minimize the risks if you:

• are very careful on what you build and install and where and who does that come from,
• always use the Slackware commands for installing/removing/replacing packages (possibly through a front end),
• are prepared to reinstall genuine Slackware packages if need arises.

One useful tool is also to ldd all the bin, lib, lib64 directories and subdirectories, and check the .la and .pc files.

One that I use from time to time is slpkg. It works great for SBo. Just report the bugs you find to the maintainer and they usually get fixed relatively quickly. I don't recommend using it on -current, just for 14.1.

I regularly use sbopkg/sqg, slackpkg+ and good old pkgtools on -current.

Best Slackware dependency manager

Great tips in this thread!
In the final analysis the best Slackware dependency manager is you when things go awry or if one of the excellent above-mentioned tools fail. I love Slackware because it does not have dependency resolution.

My

I've been using the Me-Myself&I dependency manager. It's awesome.

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look at Salix, there are the dependency info beside the package, so it's full optional and follows therefore IMHO the main philosophy of Slackware, but slapt-get can deal with it.

And when something breaks, you can contact support @ 127.0.0.1

sbotools does a good job of getting the majority of "required" dependencies thanks to how SBo uses the .info files (you can choose to do optional stuff yourself). Everything else in Slackware however mainly revolves around doing a full/complete installation.

It would be nice to add dependency information into the main tree of packages, but it's mostly unnecessary.

Already available:
http://slackware.org.uk/salix/i486/slackware-14.1/deps/
http://slackware.org.uk/salix/x86_64...are-14.1/deps/
Completely useless for a Slackware full installation, useful in other cases, e.g. for derivatives that do not ship all Slackware packages in their distribution media like Salix or Slackel.

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Just for fun.

Want to know how many packages depend on ncurses?I requested an upgrade of ncurses but understand that this needs some time

EDIT actually, piping to cut is unnecessary to just get the number.

In addition, it is also available as "PACKAGE REQUIRED:", "PACKAGE CONFLICTS:", "PACKAGE SUGGESTS:" lines of
http://slackware.org.uk/salix/i486/s...1/PACKAGES.TXT
http://slackware.org.uk/salix/x86_64...1/PACKAGES.TXT
slapt-get uses these sources.

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Thanks Serg. Learning how slapt-get works is in my TODO list

I have tried almost all of third party package managers and in my opinion all of them have their pros and cons.

I think the best and the most conservative way to install packages on Slackware is: going to SBo site, reading info file of needed package and it's dependencies, manually downloading package source and SlackBuild (downthemall add-on works very good on mozila based browsers), manually building package and installing it using installpkg. For packages with many dependencies (they are few) you can use Alien repository.

Using dependency manager tools without necessary attentions always have the risk of replacing stock Slackware packages with newer/older/modified version of same packages.

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I think I will try Salix again as I explained at bottom of this page: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...727/page2.html