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

Fri Jul 19 15:34:10 UTC 2013
Current MATE 1.7 development (future 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
-current, 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 -current 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

Mon May 20 21:01:33 UTC 2013
Pat just added itstool to Slackware-current. if you are building MATE on
-current with Pat's new itstool installed, you shouldn't need to build the 
itstool package in the MATE SlackBuild repository.  And if you are using the
mate-build-base.sh script, then please edit that script and remove this line:

deps/itstool \

And then proceed with running the script.  Please report any issues.  Thanks!

Sun Mar 24 04:48:35 UTC 2013
Pat just added dconf to Slackware -current and dconf is included as a
dependency package in the /base directory.  So, if you are building MATE on
-current with Pat's new dconf installed, you shouldn't need to build the dconf
package in the MATE SlackBuild repository.  And if you are using the
mate-build-base.sh script, then please edit that script and remove this line:

deps/dconf \

And then proceed with running the script.  Please report any issues.  Thanks!