error tolerance

[Mikus Grinbergs]

I knew that updates had been made to the gnome 3rd party repository
for 64-bit SuSE 10.0.  So in 'smart --gui' I clicked on 'Update
channels'.  When that finished, I clicked on 'Upgrade all packages'
and affirmed that it should do the downloads now.  A __HUGE__
number of packages were *not* downloaded - at the end there was an
error panel saying over and over something like "the package length
did not match the header".  [By the way, that error list does NOT
have scrollbars, so I was only able to see one screen's worth,
wheras the whole error list would have required MANY screens!]

So I instead did 'apt-get update' followed by 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
Packages are being downloaded as I write this!  Unless the repository
was "fixed" in the hour between me updating in smart and me updating
in apt, smart was less tolerant of flaky headers? in the repository
than apt was.


By the way, smart does an "all or nothing" install of the packages it
has been told to fetch.  Have problems with even one, and smart does
NOT try to install any of the others.  I WISH smart had an equivalent
of the '-m' parameter for apt-get, which says "do all you can", and
(when used with huge upgrades) *will* in my experience install those
packages which (with their dependencies) were downloaded successfully,
even if other packages failed to fetch.

mikus