Re: Difference between debian and slackware

[Stephen Masterman <floyd@animals.mit.edu>]

   Could anyone simplify that? Resolving conflicts between modules is really not my job and I do not know 
   the intricasies of these modules.

Its really not all that complicated.  There is a file called Packages, which
should be under the stable directory (or close to that) and it lists all of
the available debian packages, including their name, the filename (different
than the package name), the version, description, etc.  It also might have
some fields such as 'depends', where it lists other packages that this package
must have to work properly.  So if you want to install package 'elm', you'll
see that it 'depends' on 'smail | sendmail'.  That those are joined with the
logical OR tells you that it needs 'smail' or 'sendmail' in order to function.
So make sure you install one of those packages before installing elm.  
Another field is 'conflicts', where the names of packages which conflict 
with the current package appear.  So under 'sendmail', you'll see that it
conflicts with 'smail', which means that you can not have both installed
at the same time.
That's about all there is to it, and since dselect is supposed to keep track
of all this for you, you just have to figure out how to use dselect, which
for me was the hardest part of the whole thing.  In fact, I blew it off and
just use dpkg.

Good luck,
Steve