How important/useful is dependancy checking?

[deek]

Fair enough:) Fortunately, I have yet to disagree with Patrick, so it has all worked out for me!

[Shingoshi]

Hey,

For my main computer I'm undecided as to which distribution to install: Slackware, Debian & Gentoo.

The only thing (well, and apart from there not being a 64-bit build) stopping from choosing Slackware is that there package manager doesn't have dependacy checking, as you all know.

So, given that the package manager doesn't have dependancy checking, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this?

Also, I hear that in Slackware 10.2, since it doesn't come with Gnome, some applications (e.g. Gnumeric) do not install, what can be done about this?

Thanks in Advance
Tom

Hi Tom,
I have been running Slackware for about five years. I found myself using it after several software database crashes on other distributions. When I found out that I could install Slackware over an existing system and recover much of what I had previously lost, I fully switched to Slackware. Now I am running Slamd64, as one of the other writers has mentioned. I am running my 32-bit wine applications without any trouble. I have Freerock Gnome installed as well. But I actually prefer KDE instead. I have an SMP box running on an AMD Opteron 2210. I recently compiled my kernel to support the cpu. As for dependencies, that's probably why I don't use Gnome, even though I have Slapt-get on my system. Some of my previous problems stemmed from the fact that I tended to want to latest of everything that was (is) available. I also wound up installing software from different sources. On an rpm based system, this is more likely than not fatal. Which is precisely why I lost several system installations in the process. Slackware and it's derivatives can or likely never have those kinds of trouble.

I also build a lot of my own software. So I still get the "fix" I want from living on the edge, without cutting myself with it'. Slackware is in my opinion phenomenal. I wouldn't run anything else unless I built it myself!

If that's not a ringing enough of an endorsement, I don't know what else could.

Shingoshi

[crin]

One recommendation, Try using slackpkg, it is in the extra directory on disc2 and I've found I like it much better that slapt-get and swaret. I was a long time user of swaret, but I didn't like having to merge all the .new files. I found slackpkg and tried it and loved it. It know's what to do with all the .new files and will ask you what you want to do, and if you need to it will let you edit any of them before the merge.

Thank you,
C-rin

[placeb0]

So, given that the package manager doesn't have dependancy checking, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this?

Slackware's Packager Manager dosent need to have dependency tracking because the Packages ship with the required libs etc so no dependecy tracking is required(almost the same as a win32 application just not win32 and "closed binary", slacks are prebuilt :P)

If you do get dependency problems, you can always deal with them by hand. Pretty simple process acctually.