How big stable is Gentoo community 986

mst

From the link :

"slapt-get does not provide dependency resolution for packages included within the Slackware distribution. "

A few months ago,I needed to install new kde packages, tried to use slapt-get but it croaked even though the sources were set correctly. I had to download separate .tgz packages and then use pkgtool to install them. Brought back bad memories of Redhat.

I then realized that if I ever needed to add a package quickly, I would be stuck resolving dependencies and googling for what packages to use. When you want to do something in a hurry, you do not want to spend time doing all that. In my experience with Debian, its very rarely that I ever had to compile anything (mainly some obscure libraries that I needed), and its rare for me to ever spend more than a minute or two getting the packages.

I think that Slackware is a very elegantly designed distribution (Pat deserves a hearty vote of thanks) and the keep it simple stupid style is attractive, but package management is a problem that no one should have to face. I freely admit that Debian has spoiled me in that respect. A related problem is that there does not seem to be a clear way to upgrade from one release to another - I have 10.0 running, and would obviously like to go to 10.2. In Debian, that is as simple as editing a few words inetc-apt-sources.list and firing up apt-get dist-upgrade and while I have my lunch, in about an hour or so, I am running the latest release that I want. Nothing like this seems possible with Slackware.

Of course, I could be simply wrong in all of the above and do not know how to use slapt-get. In that case, please point me to some docs that I must have missed.