future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 10:01 +0100, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> 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.

I found the sheer volume of responses to my post to be pretty
encouraging. 


> > 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.

Yes, I found this out after digging around in the code.  I'm still not
sure why Smart doesn't always pick up the GTK theme however (this is
what first made me think it was using GTK 1), but that's not a huge
issue.

> 
> > 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.

Not "can't", more of "you don't want to bother trying".   Smart mirror
support doesn't work with Fedora mirrors and as of Fedora 9, all there
is are mirrors.  The concept of baseurl is more-or-less gone from the
standard Fedora repo system.

Incidentally, I applied the patch suggested by Grant and find the
situation much happier now:

http://tracker.labix.org/issue350 

It doesn't solve the requirement for a baseurl, but it makes it much
easier to use the mirror url.

Is there a particular reason this plugin can't be included by default or
at least prominently linked on the home page?

> > 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.

The most advanced software in the world can become obsolete if it isn't
cared for.  Clearly the ideas in Smart are among the best around, but as
of today, I can't easily recommend Smart to Fedora users anymore (which
to some degree, means I can't recommend Fedora anymore).

Regards,
Cliff