I am going to go out on a limb here and forgive me if I do not have this exactly correct. Perhaps someone will make corrections for me.

One of the biggest contributors to the dependencies issue is how RPMs and DEBs split up the source code into the application and development packages. Slackware does not do this. As I understand it, this is part of the reason that you can have multiple versions of the same lib on a slackware box, while this ends up causing "dependency hell" on RPM based distros. I have, on a number of occasions upgraded to -current and then broke gnumeric from Freerock as a result of down-grading one of the libs it depends on (libgsf I think was one). The solution was to install both versions of libgsf. Problem solved. I don't think an RPM based distro will let you do this - not easily anyway.

If I do install a program and then discover it won't run as a result of some missing dependency, I just run the following command:

ldd /path/to/binary (i.e ldd /usr/bin/gnumeric)

This tells me what is "not found" and I just install the missing pieces.

Slackware comes with practically all the deps excepting the GNOME deps. (as stated above).

For games, one of the most required deps is OpenAL. Besides of that only rare games require some dependencies. (Lua, Cal3D, Zope, etc).Many of them (like Pingus) require the dependencies only if you want to build them from source. The game client itself generally doesn't have deps.

If you install all the "D" series of the disc 1 , you might be able to compile pretty much everything from source.

It is also true that in Slack you can generally have many versions of the same thing (e. g. Python 2.3.5 and 2.4.1 ).

The only problem I had with dependencies was when trying to install a game called Balazar (balazar.nekeme.net). It asked me dependencies over dependencies. And Python 2.3.5 . And when it finally compiled and ran, it hanged when I tried to actually play it. Hope I will actually be able to play it some time soon.

May the Source be with you all!

as has been said, gnome dependencies can occassionally be a problem... I recommend staying up to date with the glibc libraries (as well as all the glib), especially if you ever decide to use swaret or slaptget to upgrade slack

@folkenfanel
python and me are old pals