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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum.

How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?

As far as I read about it, they don't! Dependency resolution is fully up to the user.

> The package management system does not track or manage dependencies; however, when performing the recommended full install, all dependencies of the stock packages are met. For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the program. Since no official lists of dependencies for stock packages are provided, if users decide to install a custom installation or install 3rd-party software, they will need to work through any possible missing dependencies themselves. Since the package manager doesn't manage dependencies, it will install any and all packages, whether or not dependencies are met. A user may find out that dependencies are missing only when attempting to use the software.

Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#Dependency_resolutio...

Oof, that sounds like a lot of work.

Simplicity is a virtue but sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Yes. I think the question always is where should I stop?. Cos it is a tool to get things done right?

While I think it is difficult to get Arcg going, the whole point of that effort is that I don't have to deal with it much after that. It is a rolling release and get the latest upstream releases which is not meddled with by distro much. Unless you are meddling with it too much, it is very stable IMO.

> How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?

        slackpkg update
        slackpkg upgrade-all

This is how you get the most recent version of all installed packages. You can run this every morning and you will have more modern tools than using ubuntu.

As for dependencies, as long as a new version does not add a new dependency, you are good. But changing dependencies of a software package is a major change that should not happen automatically. Recursive "dependency resolution" is a disgusting practice that has no place in a sane world. Dependencies are part of the API: changing dependencies is supposed to break your package, unless you do something about it.

In practice, in the rare case when this happens, you will not get any warning when upgrading. But you will get an error when running your program (that has become broken because of a missing dependency). The error message will be very clear, something like:

        "Runtime error: libfoo not found"

And the solution to this problem will be evident evident:

        slackpkg install libfoo

There is no official dependency support, but there are projects out there that add dependency resolution to slackpkg[1][2] and sbopkg[3][4]. A few of the Slackware-based distros have their own method of dealing with it as well.

[1] https://slackpkg.org

[2] https://www.slackwiki.com/Slapt-get

[3] https://sbopkg.org

[4] https://github.com/McDutchie/sbodeps

Keeping everything up to date in not usually required. But then comes a program with "bug fixes and performance improvments" which does not work with libxlst-2.67.45.35.77.so.2 and needs libxlst-2.67.45.35.78.so.4. And this lib needs another one and so on. Only if people would think a bit before releasing something the world would be a better place. That's why i like Patrick. He tries hard to make a stable release even during times when "if compiles, ship it" is the mantra.

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