What dependency hell??
 

Hi,

I recently tried to install slackware on a laptop with a 2gb hdd and actually got surprised that I could boot the computer and get a shell. Got a few libs problems and X won't start but I'll have to investigate this...
So since I have been doing full installs so far, and that I'd like to install squid on my router/firewall/wap, I thought that I could trim down on stuff that I don't really use, with only 8 gb hdd any extra bit of space I might get would be welcome, note that this box uses slackware 10.2 with kernel 2.6.18. Of course I backed up some of the most important config files and all before I fired pkgtool!! To my great disappointment my system was still working after uninstalling stuff and rebooting the computer. It's headless so I can't see if I get error messages at boot or not, but it works!!

My questions really is, how come is the system still working? I thought uninstalling stuff with pkgtool wasn't suppose to work very well since it doesn't dependency checks!?

Shortly said, you didn't remove anything dangerous :) try and remove glibc or something "important"..

Don't tempt him... bad experience about removing glibc... truly broke system :)

In my experience, you can only truly appreciate the frustration of "dependency hell" with a RPM based distro. ;) Slack's just somehow too clever that way.
As for removing glibc, I'm pretty sure that would screw even Debian, dependency resolving or not (and no, I aint going to try it to find out) :)

Thanks for the input guys!!!

U all are right, I didn't try to remove glibc! Why? Well I can say that I am familiar enough with the system to know that this is not something that should be removed...

So lets say for instance that I keep uninstalling stuff via pkgtool apart from any libraries since they do seem to cause troubles.

Anyone tried this?

Why were you disappointed ?

No dependency checking doesn't mean you have to do a complete installation. It means you have to know what you're doing when you remove a package. Is this package used by another one that I want to keep ? If not then you can safely remove it.

You can do a minimal installation by not installing packages in E/, F/, K/, KDE/, KDEI/, T/, TCL/ and some in A/ and XAP/ directories.

Sounds like that well known parlour game where you keep removing blocks till the whole tower collapses. Must say, I've not tried that with my Linux box. Interesting concept though.

Yes I wish it could be that simple but the first time I tried not to do a complete installation I endend up with a system unusable. I am really interested to find out how to know which packages are used by others and which are not!!!

Wikipedia says:

High cohesion and low coupling are attributes of good design



Is that the case for slackware? I mean I know it's good design but is it high cohesion and low coupling??



yeah why not you know... Have to experiment and see =)

I agree that it's not easy to know which packages are used by others.

If your first interest is to know a generic way to know that, I can't answer (no magic formula here).

What I suggested is that you can safely remove applications that you don't want to use (and of course that you know about).

The directories I listed in my previous posts are some safe bets: if you don't use Emacs (E/), KDE (KDE/ and KDEI/) and if you are familiar with X applications (XAP/ : for example you may want xchat but not gaim, flubox as windows manager instead of xfce).

Also, if you're interested and have time, you can track the changelog of Slackware-current and you'll get lots of information about package dependencies as development of the next Slackware version progresses. It's a good way to learn (look at the changelog for Slack 11.0 for a preview of what will come).

Good idea!! thanks

Bugger,

I made my system unusable... but it doesn't look that's because of depencies though!

Anyone interested in this should not remove the sed(stream editor) package =) It's my fault anyway I haven't been very carefull ^^

Yeah, sed is pretty important... but check THIS out.

Boot a live-distro called Slax. Get a copy of the sed package for Slackware, and do something along the lines of the following:
installpkg -root /mnt/hda1/ sed*.tgz

And then reboot to Slackware. Problem fixed!

Even better, boot the original CD and reinstall what you need without reformatting.

Oooh look at that; I didn't know about installpkg -root. I just learnt something new. I usually chroot.

That's the beautiful part about Linux treating everything as a file... no funny registries or anything else to mess with.

I guess you could count ldconfig as something that would need to be run in the main distro... but ah well.