future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 20:29 -0700, Kai Ponte wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 June 2008 06:36:11 pm Cliff Wells 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?
> 
> I had no idea.
> 
> Looks like every other GTK app.

It's based on GTK1, which is quite out-of-date.  I've not done any GTK
programming, so I don't know how involved updating it to GTK2 would be,
but hopefully not terribly difficult.

> > 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.
> 
> I hope smart doesn't go away. I'm an openSUSE user, who will soon be the 
> recipient of a Red Hat laptop.  (I currently have two openSUSE laptops and a 
> few desktops as well as my mother and mother-in-law's system to support.)

Well, I'm hoping the same thing.  I'm going to take a look at the mirror
code this weekend to see if I can figure out how to get it to support
the mirror format YUM does.  

Also I agree that variable support in the config file would be nice, so
I'll look into that as well.

Regards,
Cliff