future of smart

[Grant McWilliams]

>
> Perhaps the solution to such enterprise support is not in the package
> manager.  If you moderated your own repository you could vet the packages
> and provide for them all being consistent to your users.   Please don't beat
> upon me if this makes no sense in your situation as I'm just...
>
> -devil's advocate
>   --
> Richard Hendershot <rshendershot at mchsi.com>
>

So we're going to have to take over managing mirrors of all of our
repositories or sit around locking things that cause problems? I'd like to
see the Directors' response to that suggestion. The answer would be "why
can't we just use a package manager that works?".

My first job is developing software 40 hrs a week and my second job is
teaching others to do so at the College level. I believe my job as a
programmer is making the life of the user easier. In the open source world
we have the idea that with knowledge comes enlightenment which may be true
but the reality is most people don't want to be enlightened they just want
to do their job without error. We got into this thing about web browsers
following standards. IE didn't but worked others did but pages broke.
Pointing out the real problem (web designers only tested with IE) didn't
help. The problem was the web browser didn't browse the web page so it was
broken.

So my solution to this whole problem is make a config option that resists
downgrades.

smart config --set downgrade=no

That way I as the administrator of all these machine can set it and the
problem goes away. The default would be the Smart behavior we see now so all
other cases allow upgrade/downgrade ability.

Grant
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