The following is a list of notes on building MATE on Slackware -current:

Sun Feb 23 01:56:59 UTC 2014
MATE 1.8 is replacing mate-doc-utils with yelp-tools. This change requires
yelp-tools and yelp-xsl to be added to deps/.  Both require itstool, which
is already available on Slackware since 14.1, so there is no need to build
itstool if you are using Slackware -current.

Tue Jun 11 00:41:15 UTC 2013
Pat has rebuilt xdg-utils in Slackware 14.1 to properly support MATE DE, so
xdg-utils patch is no longer needed in Slackware -current, but running
these two commands as normal user are still needed to set caja as the
default handler:

xdg-mime default caja-folder-handler.desktop inode/directory
xdg-mime default caja-folder-handler.desktop application/x-directory

please make a backup of your $HOME/.local/share/applications/defaults.list
before executing the above commands