On Sat, 13 May 2006 10:33:03 -0700, Mahy wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I am currently in the process of upgrading and customizing my Slack. I
> downloaded slapt-get, but after install, it told me it can't execute
> /usr/<something>/slapt-get, so i tried swaret. It performed update and
> upgrade (to "current"), downloading about 800 MB. After that, it
> started dependency checking. I was shocked when it found hundreds of
> missing libraries, that were nowhere to be found. After updatedb and
> reboot, the system is quite crippled. It states that openssl is built
> against a different version that I have now. Moreover, the X can't be
> started, complaining about fonts, about libcairo and several other
> things. I guess it all has something to do with swaret. Is it a way to
> resolve it?? TIA for any advice.
>
> Mahy
>
Swaret is not part of official slackware. There are a lot of threads
about its deficiencies, and how it can do harm to your system. The best
package management for slackware, especially for someone just starting
out, is just to learn how to do it manually and learn to use the package
manager. One way is to build your own copy of the slackware version you
intend to run. For you, that sounds like slackware-current.

I wrote this to someone else recently who was having trouble with swaret.
Cut and paste here.

Advice: in the future, do yourself a favor and learn how to do it
manually. Follow the instructions in the file (reference above) by
installing the critical packages first, then if you have a slackware
repository you can proceed by running a sequence like this:

for p in a ap d l n x xap;do
for i in $(find $p/. -type f | grep tgz$);do
echo Package: $i
upgradepkg --dry-run $i
done
done

If you pipe the output to a file, you can do more tweaking with individual
packages. You can remove packages don't want at all, or to make sure
packages are added, etc. By reviewing this output in advance you can
avoid some unexpected unpleasant surprises.

--
Douglas Mayne