Development and pending features

[Anders F Björklund]

I finished most of the hacking/developing on the features I had  
planned so far,
and they should now be available in Launchpad for review comments and  
testing...

https://launchpad.net/smart

Thought I'd try to summarize what the bugs and branches have listed  
over there.
So here goes what I think would be some nice features for future  
Smart versions:


Platform support

* bugfixes
- the patch for file descriptors, to work on Mac OS X (old patch from  
MacPorts)
- add patch for rpm.archscore, to work with older RPM versions: 4.4.7  
and 5.0.0

* plugins
- add yumchannelsync and zyppchannelsync plugins, in addition to  
aptchannelsync
   yumchannelsync is for Fedora usage, and zyppchannelsync is for  
openSUSE usage

* fink
- add support for "darwin-i386" deb packages, in addition to  
"i386" (linux2)
- add support for "fink-virtual-pkgs", system requirements for the  
Fink debs

* slack
- add support for .tbz (bzip2) and .tlz (lzma) packages, in addition  
to .tgz
- add features: requires/conflicts relations, checksums, compressed  
metadata

New Smart features

* reference
- improves the existing parsing of reference URLs, to add more  
channel support
   adds a new "Reference" tab to the GUI interface, for viewing the  
information

* changelog
- reads changelog from rpm database or files, mandriva hdlists or rpm  
metadata
   adds a new "Changelog" tab to the GUI interface, for viewing the  
information

* groups
- reads group (virtual package) information from yum comps.xml and  
yast patterns
   not the same as the existing smart groups, which come from  
packages (e.g. rpm)

* errata
- reads update errata information from external data, and adds to  
package info
   information available: type, date, summary, description, reference  
URLs (CVE)

Suggested features

* arch (backend/channel)
- support for Arch Linux / pacman packages

* cocoa (interface)
- support for Mac OS X's "Cocoa" interface

* sqlite md
- support for Yum repodata in SQLite format

* delta rpm
- support for "delta" (difference) packages


I grouped them by "minor" (0.53) and "major" (0.60) and "future", as  
I see it.
Didn't include the vague "improve documentation" or "revise  
interface", either.

Tested on Mac OS X with RPM5, MacPorts and Fink - as well as with  
various repos
from other Linux distros such as: Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva,  
Vector...

Thoughts ?
--anders