future of smart

[Kai Ponte]

On Wednesday 04 June 2008 11:20:40 pm Basil Chupin wrote:
> 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?
>
> Who really cares about the GUI as long as the application works well?

Most people - including me.


>
> Does smart sit on your Desktop and you access it every few minutes to?
> Yes? No?
>
> If NO then what's the problem with not seeing some fancy,
> all-singing-all-dancing piece of crap which only slows your system down
> with all the bangles and eye-candy which do nothing useful?

If it doesn't look good people won't want to use it.

Simple matter of fact.

Granted I usually use the command line for smart and only use the gui for 
occasional installs but I appreciate a nice-behaving and good looking GUI 
app.

As for me, I didn't use Java for many years simply because the GUI apps using 
AWT looked like garbage. Even with SWING they are better but not as nice as 
KDE/Qt or as nice as Win32/C++ apps. I refuse to use Mono simply because it 
looks awful.


>
> If YES then you don't need Linux as and operating system. Maybe you
> don't need a computer at all.
>
> > 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 use smart on the openSUSE system (currently 11.0 RC1) and I wouldn't
> not only alter any of its current workings but would fight
> tooth-and-nail to make sure smart keeps going as a viable application.
>
> I really would like to see openSUSE replace its updater/upgrader with
> something which works so very well, namely smart - so don't go knocking
> a well-working application like smart simply because in your opinion the
> GUI doesn't have flashing and blinking and star-burst effects  :-) .

That would be nice!


-- 
kai
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