future of smart

[Grant McWilliams]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 1:19 AM, Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> wrote:

> 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 It's based on GTK1, which is quite out-of-date.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
>
>
Since we're all talking after a long absence I'm going to write a quick wish
list. I myself will have zero time to do anything with smart until about the
first of September as I'll be away but here it is anyway. The list in order
of importance to me.


   1. groupinstall like yum
   2. reliable return codes everywhere - having to grep the smartpm output
   for errors is really messy!
   3. fewer cache updates especially when nothing was done.
   4. variables in repo/mirror URL
   5. Retrieve mirrorlist instead of having to have it added manually
   6. Cleaner gui - search button/pane needs to be more intuitive
   7. Cleaner syntax - sometimes it gets really messy.
   8. Docs finished

It may seems strange but I need groupinstall more than anything. I hate
having to bring Yum up to do groupinstall XFCE-4.4. Number 2 would have been
nice a year ago before I wrote several thousand lines of shell scripts
around it.  Number 3 would just make it more pleasant and wow the Yum and
Yast guys even more. Number 4 and 5 should just be done - it's 2008 now.
These two are just maturity cleanups - they're what you do when you have
everything else done. Multiple people have volunteered for the last one
(including me) but we don't seem to get a lot done. One of my former
students has volunteered to translate everything to Spanish too if that
hasn't been done already.

Grant
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