Hi

After succesfully installing the base system, I decided to set up a web server with php. Apache was already installed but php wasn't (I deselected it in the setup). After reading the SlackBook, I deduced the way to install PHP was by entering pkgtool and selecting it... Well, it obviously wasn't. I went to LinuxPackages.net and downloaded the version I was looking for. I installed it and when I tried to run php I saw that I was lacking something about libmhash. I downloaded it and tried again, but this time I was getting an "Illegal instruction" error. Well, now I've been searching through this forum, google and PHP docs to find out which are the dependencies needed, and the result is me asking this forum again

The point is: I like to manually install the packages and I want to continue doing so (just to learn a bit), but I really don't know how to "discover" the dependencies for each package. Could someone tell me the "normal" way of doing so?

Thanks for your time

this worked for me with artsd Just replace artsd with the binary you want to check.

regards,
...aaron

Try slackdeptrack. You can get it here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...3-noarch-2.tgz

slackdeptrack has worked fine (just what is was searching for!). Thanks

PD: the ldd command seemed to be too difficult to understand for me

Yeah, that's fine if you've got it installed already; but I presume that new versions have changed dependencies, and often (with more obscure apps) you don't already have an install.

I had this problem with WINE. I grabbed and installed the package using slapt-get (which more often than not works, and will even block install if it can't find a package to fulfill a dep.). It wouldn't run. So I had to grab the source and ./configure before I found that I needed bison (and something else I can't recall).

The other problem with knowing the lib's required is that it doesn't necessarily tell you what packages you need.

I think I need to try this slackdeptrack ...

OK had a quick look: it doesn't do cascaded dependencies, nor does it show any not yet installed packages that you need. So I guess it only helps when you're installing something new if someone with it installed can run slackdeptrack for you and tell you what you need?!?

I always just did an ldd `which binaryname`, and then used either common sense or packages.debian.org to find out what library I needed.


It became way too much work, and now I usually just compile from source, except for small dependencies(Such as rar, or libdvdcss) that I get from linuxpackages.net.

well,

I'm a really terrible coder and I have few spare time, but I'm working on a pkgtools wrapper (in bash, of course :P) that takes care of retrive dependencies showing them as tgz if they are installed -the script launch ldd and after greps around in /var/log/packages-. I don't know if there will be a v.1.1 (I've released a terrible v.1.0rc1) but the basic concept will be the following:
if I can grep around inside the MANIFEST.bz file I can find each tgz related to each dependency of an ELF file (generalizing: I can find each tgz related to each dependency of _ALL_ ELF files belonging to a given tgz).

you can try it by yourself: do a simple script that find all binaries inside a tgz, greps all retrived dependencies against MANIFEST.bz and after shows those deps in terms of tgz! a nice exercise - with some intrinsic aleatory behavior I suppose -

M