I just use duct that for that. In fact I duct taped most of the case to direct air flow.

So, I am taking my first Linux course, offered as an 'interest course', at a university in Montreal. It is being taught by a professor who's subject for his doctoral thesis was Linux.

At the first class he asked people for their background and Linux experience. (small class) When I told him that I had been using Slackware for about a year, he said that Slackware was his first Linux distribution, all 26 or so disks, and that he only had one question:

"Does the current distribution have a complete package manager or do you still have to resolve all dependencies yourself?"

I'd like to see a Slackware package manager that *optionally* resolves/installs dependencies.

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Isn't there already a third party package manager that attempts to resolve dependencies? slapt-get?
Requires repos to also include a meta file.

IMO if Slackware started to resolve dependencies upstream, it would turn us into lazy people unwilling to think for ourselves, and cause far more complaints. Right now, there is only one complaint - sniff sniff I can't figure out how to resolve dependencies . Resolve dependencies, then you'd have multiple complaints for every package. Why does (does not) package A require package B? You should require package C,D,E with package B, and package asdfasdf should be optional with package blah .......

If you've ever used any distro with dependency resolution, you'd know just how flawed the concept is. Boot Debian or Ubuntu in a VM, and attempt to install/remove/upgrade something

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If that is really important to you there are several Slackware derivatives that will provide exactly what you need, check them out! I'm not anti-dependency. I understand the convenience but I still see no real reason why Slackware itself has to change. It just puts more work on PatV and the team. I'd prefer they didn't waste their time on this and focussed their energy elsewhere.

And in all honesty, has it ever really caused you a problem? If you do a full install or just take out a few big parts that you know you won't need (e.g. no KDE if that is not your DE/WM of choice) it isn't that much of an issue or at least it hasn't been for me (had it, I would have looked more at Salix as my main distro). It only starts to get messy if you try and strip back too much and don't understand the complex relationships between the packages, but in that case I would ask why you are trying to strip the system back, particularly in a desktop/laptop situation. Disk space is cheaper than ever and Slackware is not that big in relative terms comparative to modern disks. Indeed for some people who have multi-gig video files lying around, the OS itself seems tiny.

Please don't get me wrong on this, I am not trying to start a big discussion.

I would like the *option* because when I want to install something, I want to install it. That's all. If it has dependencies, so be it - install them too.

For those who want more control, they wouldn't pick the *optional* 'do it all' approach.

I'll give 'slapt-get' a look-see.

Saying optional doesn't really change anything. It still takes the same amount of work for a package maintainer to hand tune the dependency information within the packages and furthermore all Linux dependency systems are optional. I have force installed packages on rpm and deb distros (and Arch for that matter) numerous times.

If only it was that simple. People have very differing opinions on if one package really depends on another. Often you can use a package without installing all the 'dependencies' and simply lose some functionality, which is good enough for one person but not another.

Robert, if you haven't already, check out slackpkg and sbopkg. With them, I find maintaining slackware to be no more difficult than more popular distributions.

Now that you mention it, i never even install the floppy package, nor add myself to the floppy group, yet due to the fact that /etc/login.defs has CONSOLE_GROUPS defined and that includes the floppy group, since i dont use a display manager and use startx instead, my users are always part of the floppy group. I wonder whats the rationale in defining CONSOLE_GROUPS in /etc/login.defs.

Robert.Thompson,

check the ability of sbopkg (http://sbopkg.org/) to load predefined build queues. Download the queues collection from here:

http://gitorious.org/sbopkg-slackwar...mits/sbo-13.37.

This will solve the dependencies problem quite nicely. Just extract the queue files in /var/lib/sbopkg/queues and then start sbopkg and go to queue > load

How does that work? Do you just, say, open sbopkg, go to queue, load Chromium and it'll load all the dependencies for it so you can just tell it to build immediately after?

Exactly that is the point of the queues. sbopkg will build all the packages on the queue in the order they are placed in the queue.

Yeah I know that, I've used sbopkg before. I just didn't know about predefined build queues.

For more information, they're mentioned in the second paragraph of the README and have their own README-queuefiles file that goes into detail (both files are in /usr/doc/sbopkg-$VER), and they're mentioned in several places in sbopkg(8) (along with the discussion of the QUEUEDIR config option in sbopkg.conf(5)). They've also got their own webpage at http://sbopkg.org/queues.php.

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the premade build queues are really nice. sbopkg will also show if you have already installed some of the packages listed in the build queue, so you can deselect them. This works only for SBo packages. For example if you have build something yourself or installed gconf and orbit from /extra, sbopkg will still show these as required (because they were not build from the slackbuilds).

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