I'll confess: I tend to get in a hurry and I can't always spend large blocks of time setting up systems.

After a false start using the wrong repositories, I set a new record this AM. Slackware 12.1 was up and running with links to the document drives,email and web for 2 users, screensavers, etc. in less than an hour.

Then I tried to install Abiword. found the tgz here:
http://slackware-current.net/
Which, BTW, seems like its going to be a very useful site.

Then started a series of dependency issues---using the regular repos, the site above, and whatever else Mother Google led me to, I slogged thru maybe 8 dependencies which Abiword kept asking for. Now, there is one I'm stuck on (did not bring the name with me to work.)

The question: Is it supposed to be this difficult? I can accept the philosophy of keeping the user/owner in the loop, but I feel I must have missed something about how to get a particular app running.

http://packages.slackware.it/ has been down several hours now, so I can't check Abiword there. (But then Abiword is not an official package, so maybe that's a dead end?)

Try slackbuilds.org instead. I see you use Archlinux so i guess you will appreciate buildscripts more than precompiled packages.

I ran into a bit of trouble with my Slack 12.1 install over the weekend, and I spent the better part of yesterday getting it back up to a usable state (by my standards). I tried to install Abiword as a lightweight alternative to OpenOffice.org, and here are the dependencies I needed to install to get it to work:

* libnomecups
* libgnomeprint
* gail
* libgnomecanvas
* libgnomeprintui
* enchant
* wv

...and then I was able to install Abiword.

Just as a caveat, that order is only important if you are installing software from SlackBuilds. If you haven't heard of them, or looked into them, I highly suggest you do.

EDIT: Note I said "tried"; while I did get Abiword to work, I just ended up defaulting to OOo.

Abiword is a GNOME application. No wonder it wants a lot of GNOME libraries. You might want to check out one of unofficial GNOME distributions for Slackware, since GNOME officially in not supported in the distro.

But for independent applications is usually not difficult at all.

Abiword is a bit of a drag to compile and install, because of all these (Gnome) dependencies.
The last Slackware version that had Abiword on board, was SW 10.2 (if I'm not mistaken).
I don't use it anymore, because of the hassle to install it properly (and with spell checker in your own language...) and use Kword nowadays. It's in a stock Slack installation and spell checking is fine and easy to install.

If you want Abiword desperately, you can go to SlackBuild.org and there they have an Abiword build script (and tell you which dependencies you need (except for other spell checkers than English!).
You can also go to Slacky-eu where you can download a precompiled package and where they tell you which dependencies you need (suddenly a lot more than at SlackBuilds.org, but you will be able to get a spell checker working in your own language -if that's not English).

Thanks, all...

Will definitely try Slackbuilds. Meanwhile, it bugs me that--last time around--I had Abiword working much more quickly. Naturally, I did not keep notes on where I found everything....

http://packages.slackware.it is still down. Does it list dependencies for official packages? Does anyone list them for unofficial packages?

If one wishes to chicken out and use a dependency-checking package manager, what are the top choices?

Does Kword support .doc format (read and write)?

Yes, kword supports .doc format. As to a dependency-checking package manager, slapt-get can check dependencies if a file called slack-required is present in the package. Which is the case with the abiword package you downloaded.

If you can live with an older version of Abiword, the hard dependency on anything gnome stared after abiword-2.2.9. As you may know, slackware included some of gnome up till 10.1. Abiword-2.2.9 was included with slack-10.2 because it could still be compiled wtihout any gnome stuff. After that, the print preview code was re-written to depend on gnomeprintui which needs to other gnome stuff mentioned in order to compile. if you roll your own packages, you'll need gconf and maybe a couple of others at compile time. The apps don't need them to run, but they are required to compile.
If you want to try abiword-2.2.9, you'll fribidi (IIRC).
./configure --disable-gnome --disable-enchant --disable-debug
I started out to try to hack the print-preview routines for later versions so that you could use Xlibs as before, but since I don't use the thing, I couldn't justify the time/grief, etc.

Quite often unofficial package maintainers will list deps needed for their packages, but not always.

As suggested, slapt-get does try to resolve them for you if the packager bothered to put the needed file into the package.

I like slackbuild.org as well as Alien Bob's slackbuilds. I've always had good luck with them and have never had any trouble getting the deps for their packages as they usually list them and have them available for download as well.

The maintainer of that site is a squatter who uses the name slackware-current for his web site when he should have stayed away from using Slackware's brand name.
After some pushing, he added the red disclaimer text on the top of the front page because people actually think this site is for the development of slackware-current. Folks, it is not!

The packages you find there are badly built (try to inspect some and compare them to similar packages in other repositories), and do not come with the sources/buildscript.
Stay away from this site and excercise great caution.

Eric

Robby seems to have build those packages (as well as the dependencies).

The easiest way to find out dependencies is to install a pre-built package and run it from the command line, it will either run or generate a missing dependency error. Install the missing package and goto the previous sentence then loop until it runs.

samac

I have never heard of that site (slackware-current.net) before.

Abiword + deps from SlackBuilds.org working perfectly here. Personally, I prefer building using SlackBuild scripts from SlackBuilds.org. Otherwise, I would only install binary packages from sites hosted by known Slackware contributors like Eric, Robby, etc.

Yeah, I agree, that's what I do, I know there's probably a list of dependencies somewhere, but sometimes it's hard to find and sometimes there's more than one way to build a package. Places to check are the README, INSTALL, their main site, './configure --help', and simply running './configure' will error out on the package you need. If it says you need GNOME, look for an option like '--disable-gnome' where it will disable as much as GNOME as possible.