* Oliver Jones <oliver(a)deeper.co.nz> [2005-04-26 12:35]:
No nifty tools to upgrade versions or patch bugs. You could run the setup tools and install something still on the CD but that was about it.
curl ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt man upgradepkg
When you wanted to install a new application that didn't come with your distro you had to download the source and build it yourself. This ultimately became a nightmare. Especially if you wanted to uninstall something that had sprayed itself all over /usr/local and didn't have a 'uninstall' make build target.
man checkinstall Also: make install DESTDIR=/tmp/makepkg man makepkg
Or if the application required a different version of a library you had already installed.
Package managers can’t make that any easier. Centralized package repositories can. In short, you can very well do without any dependency management, without a large package repository, building stuff from source, and you can still have package management, and get all the vital benefits, though not all the convenience. Regards, -- Aristotle