I am quite new to Slackware Linux. After reading quite a lot about this distro, I have come to know that Slackware doesn't provide tools for managing dependencies. So how do I take care of dependencies?

If there's already a thread regarding this, please redirect me to that particular thread.

Start with a full install. RTFM before installing new applications (for example, slackbuilds.org lists dependencies in the build script descriptions).

That's really it.

If you need to install a number of SlackBuilds in a specific order (to satisfy dependencies), then you can use sbopkg (it's a frontend for SlackBuilds.org) to create and run a build queue.

yeah, what he said.... sbopkg saves a lot of headaches. you can even select a package with dependencies, go select the dependency packages, then re-sort the queue to install the packages in the correct order. this saves a lot of time and trouble. the only problem i'm finding with sbopkg is that some packages i want have been moved or whatever from their address as sbopkg sees it.

Adding just a little bit to dugen's excellent advice, you may want to build something for which there is no SlackBuilds.org or Slacky.eu or some other Slackware package available; e.g., you download a package.tar.gz, unpack it and proceed with configure-make-make-install. When configure runs, it'll typically yammer at you about missing libraries and the like and stop. Pretty simple to find and install something that's missing or the wrong version or whatever and rerun configure till you get a successful conclusion. Not as pleasant as simply executing Whatever.SlackBuild but easy enough to not be a huge problem (and, usually, things that are missing or the wrong version are available at SlackBuilds.org.

One additional tool you may want to have is Src2Pkg which is an excellent automagic Slackware package build-a-package-from-the-source utility -- it won't deal with missing or version dependencies (that's your responsibility), but it goes a long way toward making what you do choose to install easy to maintain and update.

Fact is, library and version requirements are almost always included on the source web site or in a README or INSTALL file in the software package. Ain't that hard.

Hope this helps some.

but rember to use packages made by slackbuilds whenever possible, you'll find much easier to track which stuff is installed and where (you'll have to trade the losing of this feature when you just "configure; make; make install").

You can cheat by looking at the repositories http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Download for SalixOS (based on Slackware) but with dependency tracking. I often look to see if they have a package and look at the dependency list.

samac

I have used Salix as an extra source of packages as well. Quite handy and they provide build scripts in their source directory if you do want to customise a package. They build scripts are typically in SLKBUILD format but this doesn't bother me as I also use Arch and SLKBUILDs and PKGBUILDs (from Arch) look very similar.

Get sbopkg at http://www.sbopkg.org/downloads.php

Download the 'pre-built package', see: Package: A pre-built Slackware package of the latest version of sbopkg...

In a terminal, change to where the download was saved and do:(today it would be: installpkg sbopkg-0.34.1-noarch-1_cng.tgz )

Then, in the terminal, type: and it will start.

2 members found this post helpful.

What about using ldd? I usually start with for example 'ldd $(which emacs) at the shell.
It is slower but it helps.

I never tried this, but it might work:

requiredbuilder is a tool designed to determine Slackware packages dependencies: http://www.stabellini.net/requiredbuilder.html It relies on ldd, as per question.

This would involve exploding all Slackware's packages; e.g:

mkdir /tmp/build
cd /tmp/build
tar xvf /media/SlackDVD/slackware64/y/bsd-games-2.13-x86_64-11.txz

Then creating a slack-required in /install of the package

requiredbuilder -v -y /tmp/build

Then re-building the package:

makepkg -l y -c n /tmp/bsd-games-2.13-x86_64-11.txz

You will need to do that for all packages.

Then you may use slapt-get to have dependency resolution

Thanks everyone for the information. I think it's sufficient.