In my case, when I was a Slackware user before Slackbuilds was created, sometimes I wanted to try out programs for which there was no package. Usually they requ

In my case, when I was a Slackware user before Slackbuilds was created, sometimes I wanted to try out programs for which there was no package. Usually they required a .so file that was not installed and a workaround was to put it manually from a package of another distribution compiled for the same architecture. When the .so file was there, but on another path, a symbolic link was sufficient. The ldd command was a good friend. Of course that was not the best and cleanest solution, having things outside the package management system bothered, but it was enough to experiment programs and I kept track of the changes so I could have the prior state of things. Later on, the Slackbuilds project eased the work and I contributed by writing code to automate the creation of a few packages. I learned a lot from these issues.