Ansible on Slackware-current in 2025

8 September, 2025

My notes on how to install the latest Ansible on Slackware-current, as of September 2025. The SlackBuilds for the ansible and ansible-core packages still target Slackware-15.0 so a lot of the python3 dependencies are now included in Slackware-current. At the time of writing, these notes cover installing ansible 11.9.0 and ansible-core 2.19.1.

Using the Sbopkg queue generator (sqg) against the Slackware-15.0 SlackBuild repository, we can get the old (15.0) dependency list.

sqg -p ansible
cat /var/lib/sbopkg/queues/ansible.sqf

Of the 20 packages in the queue, 5 are required at run-time (shown in bold below), 3 are required at build-time for the cryptography package (shown in green), 12 are now included in Slackware-current or don’t appear to be required (shown in grey).

python3-flit_core (included)
python3-installer (included)
python3-wheel (included)
python3-pyproject-hooks (included)
python3-build (included)
python3-packaging-opt (included)
python3-setuptools-opt (included)
python-zipp (included)
python-importlib_metadata (included)
python3-resolvelib
python3-toml (included via python-tomli-w)
importlib-resources
rust-opt (included)
python3-semantic-version (build-time only)
python3-typing-extensions (not required?)
python3-setuptools-rust-opt (build-time only)
python3-maturin (build-time only)
cryptography
ansible-core
ansible

At the time of writing, the SlackBuild for ansible-core is for version 2.15.12 which uses setup.py for building and installing. This installation method was removed from ansible-core in August 2023 and the pyproject.xml method is used instead. To make the SlackBuild work with the latest 2.19.1 version (September 2025), edit the ansible-core.SlackBuild to replace the setup.py line with calls to the python-build and python-installer tools.

ansible-core.SlackBuild changes for 2.19.1

#python3 setup.py install --root=$PKG
python3 -m build --wheel --no-isolation
python3 -m installer -d "$PKG" dist/*.whl

Note that ansible-core builds fine without the importlib-resources and python3-resolvelib dependencies but at least the latter is required for ansible-galaxy to work. As python3-typing-extensions is listed as a dependency of python3-setuptools-rust-opt, which builds fine without it and is a build-time only requirement itself, I assume it is safe to leave it out.