I just upgraded from slack 10.1 to current. everything seems to have gone without a hitch except this one little question I'd like to know about.

One of gnumeric's deps in slack 10.1 is libgsf. When I upgraded to current, it seems that the file libgsf-gnome-1.so.1 was either changed or removed. However there is a file in the new libgsf-1.11.1 package named libgsf-1.so.1.11.1 that looked like it replaced libgsf-gnome-1.so.1. So I linked libgsf-gnome-1.so.1 to libgsf-1.so.1.11.1 and it seems to be working alright, but I want to know if any of you experts here can confirm whether that was the right step to fixing that problem? Or is it just just keeping gnumeric quiet but not really right?

sometimes that's just the way it goes...

if it wasn't correct, you would know because the symbols gnumeric uses from libgsf would be undefined by the linker ( and thus wouldn't start).

The libgsf package contains libgsf and optionally can be build as libgsf-gnome.
I guess since gnome was removed from current, that recent version are being compiled as libgsf only, but it's the same library, the symlink you did is a correct way to temporarily fix this.
The best way of course, would be to recompile gnumeric against libgsf.

Thanks for the quick replies.