future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 19:29 -0700, Grant McWilliams wrote:
> 
> 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. 

Actually I've had this happen a couple of times and it appears to me to
be a packaging and/or mixed repositories issue.  The reason it affects
Smart is because Smart is the only one of the bunch that can actually
*do* a downgrade.

> 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.  

Yeah, it's especially annoying to try to do a quick "smart search
package", have the package not found but the cache updated anyway =)


> 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. 

Smart is mostly of interest to me for its intelligent dependency
resolution and the ability to selectively downgrade packages to satisfy
those dependencies.  I've seen no other package manager able to
accomplish this as reliably as Smart.

As far as PackageKit, it seems to be taking the least-common-denominator
approach and that's not appealing to me.  It might have a decent roadmap
for the future, but currently it's one of the worst I've ever seen (on
FC9 the GUI can only select a single package for installation, so if you
want to install several packages you better use the CLI).

Anyway, I'm going to take a look to see what it would take to get usable
mirror support into Smart.  Right now this is a show-stopper on Fedora.

Regards,
Cliff