OK, I'm stumped

[Pascal Bleser]

Christoph Thiel wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Pascal Bleser wrote:
> 
>> Mine includes three things the package from the BS does not (on 
>> purpose):
>> - - a patch to improve Smart's "install" behavior on x86_64
>> - - a patch to handle mirror definitions embedded in .channel files
>> - - comes preconfigured with most channels you'll need on SUSE
>>
>> Basically, our opinions differ on the latter. Christoph (who maintains 
>> the package in the BS) thinks it's a bad thing that makes a lot of 
>> problems. I think it's a good thing that makes life a lot easier for 
>> beginners (and personally I haven't seen many problems with it).
> 
> I don't think it's a bad thing per se -- it's just impossible to ship 
> those kind of pre-configured smart packages on SUSE for legal constraints.

Yes and no.
We could at least ship the SUSE channels (inst-source, non-oss as
disabled, online updates and the smart repository in the openSUSE
Build Service).

Unfortunately Packman and Guru repositories may not be included if the
package is hosted @ Novell, for legal reasons.

I've never seen anyone disable those repositories when using Smart,
it's actually the opposite. But well, that will be a drawback we'll
have to live with.

The mirrors are also somewhat problematic, because shipping mirrors
with the package requires a patch (by me) that upstream doesn't want
to merge.
The other problem is that a list of preconfigured mirrors can only be
geared towards users in Europe or in the US, not both.

A better solution would probably be to drop the mirror patch and put
mirror configuration files for Europe and the US (and possibly others)
somewhere else.
The drawback is that it makes installation more "difficult" (one or
more additional steps).
Would be the same for adding Packman and Guru repositories:

1) yast2 -i smart (*)
2) one of
smart mirror --add http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/smart/mirrors-eu
or
smart mirror --add http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/smart/mirrors-us
3) smart channel --add http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/smart/guru.repo
4) smart channel --add http://packman.links2linux.org/packman.repo
5) optionally: smart channel --enable suse-non-oss
6) smart update
7) smart install smart-gui smart-ksmarttray smart-addons

(*) or the much more verbose approach if zmd is braindead:
http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=SMART_Package_Manager

In this case, yum actually has a nicer mechanism, as it can retrieve a
list of mirrors base on the "channel" (.repo) configuration.

Of course, all of this only has an impact for less experienced users,
but given how often I see beginners happily install and use smart on
the SUSE support IRC channels, the impact is not negligible.

cheers
-- 
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <pascal.bleser at skynet.be>       <guru at unixtech.be>
 _\_v http://www.fosdem.org          http://opensuse.org


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