useability

[jnelson-smart at jamponi.net]

On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:

> On SuSE, the principal package manager I use is 'smart --gui'
> - mainly because it provides the information I want (e.g.,
> View -> Hide old  to display what's new at the repositories).
> 
> Had occasion to try to update a SuSE 10.0 system to which few
> updates had been applied in half a year (the majority of the
> available newer packages involved KDE 3.5 replacing KDE 3.4).
> 
> First try (update, mark, apply):  smart downloaded over a
> hundred packages, but did not install any because 'prepare'
> did not like the *key* for the mozilla depository.
> 
> Second try (went into marked list, unmarked the mozilla
> packages, clicked on apply):  smart had already downloaded
> the packages, so it went directly into install (or whatever
> it's called).  It filled up its display with package installs
> until it got to the bottom.  Then it sat there.  'top' did
> not show 'smart' running.  After 15+ minutes of waiting, I
> did a 'kill -9' against the smart process.
> 
> Third try ('cd /var/lib/smart/packages'):  Did 'rpm -U'
> and 'rpm -i' - they installed a third of the packages.
> Did 'rpm -F' - it installed the rest [including mozilla].
> Did 'smart clean'.

I will agree that it would be convenient for smart to say something like 
"Look, some packages could not be verified because the key they were 
signed with is unavailable or out of date. Would you like to remove 
these packages from the update list and try again?"

Of course, if no update is possible because of this condition it would 
be nice for smart to say that, too.  This, I think, would address the 
first issue you raise.

As for the second issue, I've had trouble with the gui version that I 
did not have with the console (--shell) - perhaps that is the problem?

--
Jon Nelson
jnelson-smart at jamponi.net