Slack 12. I went to upgrade today and slapt-get comes back wanting to download and install kdebase and kdelibs. What the heck?

I don't have KDE, never used, never installed - I'm sure of this. I use fluxbox and have very little installed.

Is some program wanting something in one of these packages? Everything works, so I don't know why it's doing this.

Thanks

slapt-get only upgrades packages that are already installed, it goes by your list of installed packages that are generated by pkgtools. If it wants to upgrade them, then they must already be installed.

If not, then the only other possibility is that you are using an unofficial package that includes dependency information which is indicating that KDE is required. Unfortunately, I know of no way to list what depends on what in an easy-to-read fashion. You might have to page through package_data in /var/slapt-get.

But I'm using the official Slack 12 from slackware.com (or their FTP site) and I have no KDE stuff - and pkgtool agrees - none listed. It wants to install this K stuff, not upgrade it. Seems that something is listing it as a dependency? Isn't that the only way that could happen?

Seems to me that I've got some program unnecessarily listing K as a dependency?

The only things I've installed are Opera, xmms, slapt-get, gslapt (which behaves the same way of course) and some fonts. I installed SeaMonkey but uninstalled it. That's it...

??

I just slapt-get -install conky and audacious installed!

When I slapt-get -remove audacious it wants to remove conky... LOL

wft is going on...

There is no guarentee that unofficial packages are going to have correct dependency information, so you have to use them at your own risk.

You can override the dependency information for a package by installing it like:

Thanks MS3. I'll read up on dependencies from the viewpoint of them not being trustworthy. I just didn't expect that type of loose discipline in packages. At first I was nervous from Slack's approach to package management, or basically lack thereof, but this has really shed some light on their reasoning. One of the first things I did was install slapt and gslapt on top of it, but I'd much rather install an app and have an error message tell me it needs something else rather than install half the world onto my hd just for a tiny 30k app to run... It's almost like spyware it seems to me - you download an app, go to upgrade it and what do you know - they want you to download this OTHER app you don't even need. Wow, I'll bet folks' systems are so messed up and bloated because of this... and people like to think package managers are a necessary thing.

A real eye opener this has been.

Yes, that is exactly the reason that Slackware doesn't do dependency resolution; many times you end up installing things you don't need and wasting your resources.

For example, in the case of Conky; since Conky can display track info from Audacious, somebody put Audacious as one of it's dependencies. Now slapt-get wants to install and remove Audacious along with Conky, even though you may or may not have even been interested in that particular function.

Other programs that are good examples of this are things like MPlayer. MPlayer will link against dozens of libraries if you let it, many of which you probably don't want or need. If you are using somebody else's build of MPlayer, you need to have all of those libraries installed for it to run, even if you never plan on using those features.

It takes longer and is more difficult, but the best way to really make sure your system is as bloat-free as possible is to compile new software from source and manually handle the dependencies of features you actually want.