Retaining knowledge of what is new

[Mikus Grinbergs]

Was running 'smart --gui' on SuSE 10.0.  I've made it a practice
that after I do an 'update' (and download "upgrades") I do a
'hide old' and look at ALL the "new" packages the 'update' found
-- in case I see a newly-available package that is not an "upgrade',
but that I would want to install anyway.

Today I did an 'update' and "upgrade" (which installed a number of
newly-available packages).  The smart log file from the "upgrade"
advised me to separately install yet another package.  I used
smart's search function to look for that specific package, and
found that that package was already installed on my system.  To
be safe, I told smart to 'reinstall' that package, which it did.
I then asked smart to 'hide old', but to my surprise smart now
showed me a panel that was empty.  [Note:  I had clicked on the
'update' (leftmost) icon ONLY ONCE, way back at the beginning.]

What does smart think is 'old' ?  I had hoped that packages were
considered 'not old' if they had been identified as "changed" by
the most recent 'update'.  [In other words, I had hoped that the
status 'not old' would be reset ONLY by running the next 'update'
(I would wish -- an 'update' of that specific channel;  I hoped
that if I were to perform a segregated 'update' against a kde
access channel, this would NOT reset 'not old' status regarding
packages in a gnome access channel!).]

Do I need to change my habits to first do the 'hide old' looksee
BEFORE I do any downloads, in case knowledge of the "new" packages
gets cleared WITHOUT me ever having requested an 'update' again ?

mikus