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

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 line 52:

dconf \

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