future of smart

[Cliff Wells]

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 10:09 -0700, Grant McWilliams wrote:



> So we're going to have to take over managing mirrors of all of our
> repositories or sit around locking things that cause problems?

Actually this makes a lot of sense for managing machines.  Creating a
mirror is pretty trivial and it saves bandwidth, makes for faster
updates, lets you control versions (if you want to) etc.   

>  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?".  

I don't think any software is going to solve ignorance.   If you can
name a package manager that "works" better than Smart, I'd love to hear
about it, because I'll switch in a heartbeat.  

> 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.

I'm not sure how this applies to the current conversation.  We aren't
talking about an error.  The upgrade/downgrade cycle doesn't actually
break anything.

>  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. 

Quite the opposite.  The web pages are broken and the "developers" who
wrote them complete and utter morons without any qualification to
operate in the industry.  To make another analogy, just because WalMart
sells more stuff than anyone doesn't mean they don't sell complete crap.

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

That would be called YUM (or Apt or any other number of less capable
package managers).  YUM, apt-get, etc all behave *exactly like this* and
that's why they are, in fact, less capable.

> 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.

Why not just use the default package manager that comes with your
distro?  I'll bet you money that this is its default behavior.  The
ability to downgrade is one of the major features that distinguishes
Smart from the rest.

Ultimately, you need to not blame Smart for this particular issue.  If
you want to avoid the situation you are complaining about, you have two
simple options that are available right now:

1) stop mixing repositories
2) use YUM, Apt, etc

I want to add that I'm not being sarcastic.  If you don't like the
ability Smart has to downgrade packages, then there is very little
reason to use it rather than the distro's default packaging tool.  
If you don't want the ability to downgrade, then why exactly are you
using Smart at all?

Regards,
Cliff