future of smart

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hello Cliff,

> 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.

Development indeed has slowed down.  The main reason is because even though
there are quite a lot of users out there, only a handful of people has ever
contributed to the project, and I've only been able to put a small fraction
of my time on it.

Smart isn't *dying* anytime soon, though.  Smart is the main packaging 
technology behind the Landscape project (https://landscape.canonical.com)
at Canonical, where I spend most of my time nowadays.  Fixes are still
being made, and new versions will still be released occasionally.

> A couple of things that need addressing:
> 
> 1) The GUI is old, old, old.  Functionally it's not bad (and far better

"Old" isn't a term that has meaning for user interfaces in general.  There 
are several examples of user interfaces people are very happy to use
everyday and that have been around for a long time.

That being said, the Smart GTK GUI is simplistic, yes, and could be
improved a lot to be less of a technically-oriented experience and
become more attractive to general users.

 > than PackageKit's joke of a GUI), but GTK1?

I don't know what you're talking about here.  The Smart GUI links against
GTK 2.0 surely.


> 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.

These topics sound entirely unrelated.  I can extract several individual
facts from that statement:

a. Smart has mirror support which you find hard to use
b. Fedora offers mirrors for its packages
c. Smart mirror support wasn't made to work with Fedora

None of these facts imply in any way that Smart can't be used with Fedora,
which is incorrectly stated as a conclusion from the above facts.

> I think these two things would go a long way toward making Smart feel
> not quite so obsolete.

Smart is anything but obsolete.  I honestly hope that the other package 
tools eventually can catch up with some of the features that Smart
supports, so that we all can gain from it in the long run.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net