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

Fri Nov 15 18:59:46 UTC 2013
The following packages are now available since Slackware 14.1:
- dconf
- itstool
Thus, it's no longer needed in the deps directory anymore.
if you are using the mate-build-base.sh script, then please edit that
script and remove this lines:

deps/dconf \
deps/itstool \

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