First need to point out that I'm installing 13 to a CF card so I am just installing the bare minimum for my rig. It's running mythtv (myth installed on a separate partition).

I ran into a problem with installing font-misc-misc.
The directories /usr/share/font/encodings and /usr/share/font/encodings/large did not exist so the installer threw an error
opendir: no such file or directory

I created the dirs and re-ran do-inst.sh and that fixed all my font problems.

I realize that what I'm doing is probably against the grain, and maybe it's not a real issue. But it might help someone else.

I had initially done a installpkg x/*font* and didn't catch the error as those pkgs installed.

The symptoms were like
unable to find a suitable ISO8559-1 font
or unable to convert nil12 to type FontStruct

ctrl-rt-click in an xterm would kill the xterm and lots of other odd things, like squares instead of characters on the emacs startup screen.

(those errors are from memory, but they are close)

I suspect you didn't install the 'encodings' package prior to installing the font package. 'encodings' will create /usr/share/encodings/, which the font package expected to be there.

Ok, that seems likely. Does pkgtool figure that out? i.e. pkgtool determines that font-misc-misc has a pre-req for encodings pkg?

I don't understand how dependencies are handled.

By you.

My understanding is that the dvd installer gives option to install a few different sets, server,basic,devel (or like that). How does the installer know to install encodings first before installing font-misc-misc? Is the order hard-coded? Luck?

There is no dependency checking. That is why it is recommended to do a full install if you aren't sure. There are package managers that do dependency checking like slapt-get, but they are not part of Slackware. You have to install them. Whether or not slapt-get will check those files incuded in the intial Slackware install, I can't say. As far as installing binary packages in any particular order, I don't think it will matter so long as the dependencies are met when the program/library is called.

As far as the installer goes, I'm pretty sure it calls them from a list. Maybe FILE_LIST?

So it comes down to luck then that things get installed in the right order. Because even if you install all the packages you may not get them installed in the order in which other packages need them.

The maketag scripts control the order.

Aha! Ok will look at maketag, thanks. I'm almost to the point now where I've got everything crammed into my 4GB CF card. Actually not too bad, I think I'm under 2GB still. My point is just that I think I care less now about dependencies then I did trying to discover what was missing.

Now I need to decide on a clean way to save the whole thing.... dd or squashfs or so....or maybe I'll just save off the pkg list and kernel .config and leave it at that... but I don't know if that will be future proof with later releases.

Recent versions of slackpkg have a generate-template option that you might find useful.