future of smart

[Felix Miata]

On 2008/06/05 01:37 (GMT-0700) Grant McWilliams apparently typed:

> Anders wrotee:

>> I actually thought it was better than Pup/Pirut/Puplet...
>> Then again, those were pretty horrible to start with :-)

> Yes, they were bad. Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy in Linux to make
> really bad guis so people learn the cli. Look at just about any LVM gui as
> apposed to the command line tools and you'll see my point.

I've never seen PPP. The mgr I find most worthless is In^H^HAdept. Every time
I install Kubuntu I remove that and install Synaptic.

That said, I normally only use the GUIs for hunting packages I don't know the
names of. Among the command line mgrs, I'm awared of none that include
sufficent examples in their man pages for me do understand how to do package
searches.

I use Smart cmd line often, because it's what I use for SUSE Factory, which I
keep on about 8 systems. On all, I have restricted their / partitions to
relatively small sizes. This makes Smart's default behavior to download
everything before installing anything on 'smart upgrade --yes' a poor option,
as it quite commonly computes that more space on disk is required to install
anything at all. That's BS. There's plenty space if it behaved like urpmi did
by default, automatically finding related packages, downloading, installing,
and deleting in groups of up to 16 or so.

OTOH, 'smart upgrade --yes --stepped', rarely groups anything more than about
2 at a time. Worse than the virtual non-grouping is stopping dead and redoing
cache again every single time some package is unavailable, which most of the
time happens ONLY because it didn't retry enough times for a package that
most certainly is on the mirror. Non-stepped exhibits that same stupid
behavior. If it can't find a package, it should install what it can find, not
stop and tell me it's too stupid to retry enough times to get what's there.

Nevertheless, I use Smart in spite of its shortcomings, due to zypper's
idiotic inability to lock or multi-version kernel packages. I work around by
not using Smart when I can't baby-sit the retry & dep failures. I group
manually. e.g.:

normally:
smart upgrade --yes rpm perl-Bootloader mkinitrd zypper gl\* splash
yast2-bootloader openSUSE release yast2-theme-openSUSE udev hal dbus\* kpartx
optionally:
smart download kernel-pae
rpm -ivh ker<tab>
<edit> /boot/grub/menu.lst
shutdown -r now
normally:
smart upgrade --yes z\* y\* x\* w\* v\* u\* t\*
smart upgrade --yes k\* f*\ m*\ s\* opera epiphany
optionally:
startx
normally:
smart upgrade --yes a\* b\* c\* c\* d\* e\* g\*
smart upgrade --yes

Yum & urpmi are must smarter by default for dist upgrades where space is limited.
-- 
"Where were you when I laid the earth's
foudation?"		       Matthew 7:12 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/