hi,
i have a feeling it's possible to simply copy all of gentoo's portage directories and files (while maintaining the directory structures) onto a slackware system and have it work.
not that i'm going to try and possibly ruin my butiful slk system.
what do you think?

There is a portage like program for linux called Emerde check it out http://emerde.freaknet.org/

You theoretically could do this... but any packages you installed with it would definitly have to be installed with the no-deps option or else you'd end of with a ugly mix of Gentoo packages and Slack packages as well as a confusing mix of configuration files. It would be hard to get your ld.so.conf file to have the right library directories all the time and it would kind of defeat the purpose of portage if your base system wasn't in it's dependence database.

If you really want portage that badly, just use Gentoo.

ha. if u look at my "distros," i do have--though not necessarily use--gentoo. as i said, though, i was just curious.
right now, slackware is perfect for me. i would trade it for any other distro. cheers.

I know someone who uses that. His system is seriously screwed up.

Just use ./configure, make, and checkinstall.

poor guy/gal.

indeed that's what i use. but i think the reason it has been sufficient so far is that i use minimal fancy/exotic software. thus, dependency has not been a headache.

Well, not to harp on the issue, but using portage on slackware wouldn't help you with dependencies. The problem is portage only knows about packages installed through portage, which means if you just started installing things you'd end up with two versions of the same packages and all sorts of wierd bugs as a result of packages being linked against the wrong libraries or your Slackware base packages would just stop working because portage would blow away all Slackware's entries in the ldconfig. You'd be better off using swaret or one of the other dependency checking package managers designed specifically for Slackware.

I've always loved Slackware, but to be honest the package management system on it is the reason why I stopped using it. After a while it is hard to keep the system up-to-date and clean at the same time. I've never had that problem with Gentoo so long as I install everything through portage.

yeah yeah. don't worry. haha. i think that's suicidal. i will never mix gentoo and slackware even if you told me it were perfectly ok. i think gentoo is equal to slackware in terms of quality, and i think it only differs with slackware because of portage. but since i do not need portage right now, and i'm used to the slackware way, i'll stick with it for now.

Im sorry I was just suggesting it as an alternative to emerge.....

i tried emerde a few years ago. i had to reinstall Slack to get rid of it. there was no documentation at that time on how to uninstall it. I removed any obvious packages. any time you tried to install something, it would get involved. it was a nightmare.

The name of the program (emerde) is enough to scare me away. Maybe the devs just have an good sense of irony.