Smart on Mandriva

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hello Steve,

> I am currently using Smart 0.52 on Mandriva. Is anyone able to tell me
> what backend Smart uses, is it rpm or urpmi, or does Smart update the

In Mandriva, Smart uses rpm via the python-rpm module.

> package database itself. One of the issues I have at the moment is that the
> info I am getting from the Cooker Mailing List is that I should not be using
> Smart, because it is believed to be just a front end to urpmi and there has
> be considerable development effort or urpmi, and it is believed that Smart
> is not supported on Mandriva anyway. Can anyone shed some light on these
> situations?

The short version of the story goes somewhat like this: Mandrake developed
URPMI which was a dependency solver written in Perl, also on top of rpm.  At
the same time, Conectiva had APT-RPM, which was a port of Debian's APT to RPM.
I was its maintainer for about 3 years, and then started Smart.  Smart was
going to become the official dependency solver in Conectiva.  Then, Mandrake
bought Conectiva, and both became Mandriva, and then Smart was going to be the
default dependency solver of Mandriva.  But after a while, I left Mandriva and
joined Canonical, and Smart never replaced URPMI.

Knowing that, the following answers are easy to understand:

1. In Mandriva, Smart operates on top of rpm, just like URPMI.  On the other
   hand, Smart works with other distributions too, and depending on the
   distribution it doesn't use rpm (in Ubuntu and Debian it uses dpkg,
   for instance).

2. Mandriva won't help you with Smart, because it's not the default tool
   they use, and because they don't know enough about it.  There's a good
   chance you can get help from someone in this list if asking kindly,
   though.

I hope the amount of light here is good enough. :-)

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net