future of smart

[Grant McWilliams]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> wrote:

> I'm becoming a little worried about the future of Smart.  It's by far
> the best package manager I've used (and much, much better than the crud
> being foisted on us by Fedora), but development seems to have stalled.
>
> A couple of things that need addressing:
>
> 1) The GUI is old, old, old.  Functionally it's not bad (and far better
> than PackageKit's joke of a GUI), but GTK1?
>
> 2) Mirror support is too convoluted to be usable.  This is a really key
> point because Fedora at least, supplies nothing but mirrors these days.
> This makes getting Smart going on a FC9 box a herculean task.
>
> I think these two things would go a long way toward making Smart feel
> not quite so obsolete.
>
>
> Regards,
> Cliff
>
>
Yes and yes. I think we need to have variables for version numbers and so on
too so we don't have so many hard coded paths.
There's also bugs in Smart that are difficult to find. I've had multiple
times where smart got in an upgrade/downgrade loop that
didn't effect Yum. Maybe it's because Yum was too dumb but still, to the
user the problem was SmartPM.

I don't mind the smart gui too much but I think things could be a lot nicer
looking and the search criteria field should be a popup instead of showing
up and then disappearing. I'm OK with it the way it is but I have 200 people
in the field using Smart that aren't that great at figuring things out. They
have no problem with Yumex (which is pretty lame but it does do some things
right).  I disabled Ksmarttray because there were too many times where it
complained that it couldn't install the packages. Doing a smart update
solved the problem. Maybe that's an issue with ksmarttray.

Also someone needs to go through and take out most of the
saving/loading/updating cache lines - that's tiresome to see it save cache
when you didn't do anything.  Ah, I'd like to see a groupinstall too which
has never materialized.

Problem is with Packagekit I wonder if it's time to just let Smart go. Part
of the reason I use it is so I can have one package gui on Suse, Ubuntu and
CentOS and Packagekit will give me that at some point. I also use it because
it will install across an SSH tunnel natively but I could probably just roll
out openvpn to the clients and only need one hole in the firewall.

Grant
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