future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 18:36 -0700, 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?  

Okay, so I've been digging around in the code and it appears that SVN at
least is using GTK2... was this the case in 0.5.x as well? I've already
uninstalled it so can't look now.  Smart GUI in 0.5.x seemed to not pick
up GTK2 themes consistently so I assumed it was using GTK 1, but perhaps
it was related to not properly reading the user's .gtkrc file (although
why that would happen sporadically isn't clear to me either).

> 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.

The patch at 

http://tracker.labix.org/issue350

seems to address this adequately (at least for Fedora).

Okay, well... I guess I'll take a look at adding variable support to the
config file then =)  I could use a regex to do this but I'm thinking of
using the string.Template module... this would require at least Python
2.4... would there be any complaints about that?

Cliff