Im sure by some means anything is possible with slack.

I was pocking around in the debian forum listening to everyone talk about how great apt-get is...
So far I've heard it can run on Redhat and Mandrake as well as Debian.
Would it be worth a shot to try it on Slack or does it only work with those Debian specific packages (dpkg?)
Just curious if anyone has installed/ran it in Slackware before I attempt anything like that.

Updating Slackware is IMHO easier than using RPMs. I can't comment much about apt-get because I haven't used it before, but from it's description it's pretty much something similar to Swaret.

You might want to check that out.

I've a tgz get project on slackware.tuxfamily.org
but it's in french
Indeed it sounds interesting

apt-get is the debian way of fetching and installing applications. It is, indeed, supposed to be the next best thing to sliced bread.

Unless your app is very, very specific, it's better -- under Slackware -- to get the source code and compile it by hand.

That means *you* (and not a Debian maintainer) have to follow the application updates, security patch, etc. but it is usually pretty simple to do.

alright, that answers my question. Thanks.

Slacware packages have no dependancy checking built in, so the idea of a an APT-GET system for it is almost out of the question. Because no in-package dependancies could be resolved, the maintainers of the system would have to deal with dependancies, and thats an almost unmanagable job.

The only way I could see it really happening is if they modify Slackpacks to include some sort of even simple dependancies, but without Patricks support, it wouldn't happen.

Well, yes, everything you say is true BUT... on the other hand, Slackware was designed to be as complete & stable as possible.

This means that there are very few programs that actually require you to muck around with their dependencies to compile them.

In my experience -- and I compile software all the time on my Slack machine -- 90% of software compile right out of the box. It's just a matter of checking that you give "configure" the right directories.

For the other 9%, it's just a matter of installing/compiling the correct libraries -- and that is pretty rare. Usually, it's just a matter of downloading library foobar-1.X.tgz, and compiling it *before* compiling whatever software you want.

For instance, one trick, which I found out recently, was to install some libs from the Slack 8.1 CD-ROM, which are required if you want to compile Gnome 1 apps under Slack 9.

There is about 1% of Linux software that are a real pain in the neck to install, and, yes, this is when Slackware becomes painful to use...

I think it would be very good if Slack had a better package manager then the one it uses, IMHO.

Apt-get or something similar could be modified to work I guess.

I use both Debian and Slackware in a commercial setting. Apt-get is great, but frankly, is not inherently any better than pkgtool.

The secret to apt-get is the thousands of pre-compiled and tested .deb packages. Without those, apt-get is pretty much worthless by itself.

In terms of administrative effort, the only disadvantage to using pkgtool (or installpkg/removpkg) is that you need to download the slackpackage first. It's as easy to type installpkg foo.tgz as it is to type apt-get install foo.

Of course, there are those who will tell you that apt-get is the be all and end all of package management tools because of the dist-upgrade feature. Those who are fans of that haven't had a server break because of an ill-advised upgrade. It happens with Debian systems.

Linuxpackages has a grwoing repository of precompiled Slackware packages. Help that grow and nobody will want apt-get on Slackware because it won't be needed.