future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 09:04 +0200, Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> > 1) The GUI is old, old, old.  Functionally it's not bad (and far  
> > better
> > than PackageKit's joke of a GUI), but GTK1?
> 
> There's also a KDE version in KPackage 4 (uses Smart underneath now)
> 
> http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdeadmin/kpackage/index.html

Yes, but I'm a GNOME bigot =)  After so many years of running Linux apps
that had every toolkit under the sun, I'm insisting on enjoying a
coherent-looking desktop in my old age.

> > 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.
> 
> Did you look at the Yum plugin, with the mirror/mirrorlist additions ?
> 
> http://tracker.labix.org/issue350 (the "yumchannelsync" plugin)

Fantastic.  I'll certainly give this a run (and you just saved me hours
of work).

> I have another couple of Smart patches outstanding for Mac OS X, too...
> 
> Support for MacPorts/Fink is in, but Cocoa GUI is still missing.

So maybe the problem is more to do with release/patch management than
the codebase?  It's unfortunate that FC9 is shipping with 0.5.2 (and a
broken config) as it's certain to give potential users the wrong
impression. 

Gustavo, maybe we can get a new release so downstream will pick it up?

Regards,
Cliff