On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Darrell Anderson <humanreadable(a)yahoo.com>wrote;wrote: Third party dependencies are rarely included on the download servers for whatever project you want to build, meaning that you generally have to go to those third parties when build from source. The reason you don't have to build third party dependencies for distros like Debian/*buntu is because they use "packages" as way to put precompiled files into a virtual package with an installation script. Package managers such as debs (used by Debian and Debian-based distros) and RPMs (popular among many other distros, but not all) use "dependency resolving" to resolve dependencies for you. Slackware does not use packages in the sense of RPMs or debs; instead, it uses the concept of source packages (the way most source code is distributed, usually in compressed tarballs). Source code packaged with a script to build it for a system running Slackware using the Slackware package tools is often referred to as a "Slack Package" or "Slackware Package". The person who creates a Slack Package generally includes it in the package third party dependencies in the package because, in a source-based distro like Slackware, we cannot assume that dependencies will be installed, especially when the package manager (Slackware does have a package manager, called "PkgTools") does not have dependency resolving. Therefor, if not careful, someone using Slackware can end up with several different copies of the same libraries and programs in different locations on the filesystem, some of which will be different versions. -- Kris "Piki" Ark Linux Webmaster Wannabe Ark Linux packager