Moving from apt to smart?

[Joachim Schrod]

Hi,

[Sorry, if this appears twice. I'm new to the list and tried to 
post via gmane, but that doesn't seem to have worked; thus I resent 
it directly.]

I use apt currently and want to investigate if smart is a 
substitute for my SUSE package management. So I installed a fresh 
OpenSUSE 10.3 (from retail DVDs), updated smart to 0.52 from 
download.suse.org and played with it.

Well, after some hours, I've got a few questions, maybe you can
help me out:

  -- smart search/query/info needs rather long to output its result,
     longer than "apt-cache search/show/showpkg/policy". Actually,
     it was reported that smart is faster here, this is one of the
     reasons I'm investigating it. Judging from some (unmethodical)
     tests, this seems caused by the cache update. Any chance to
     improve that?
     Actually, why is the cache updated on every query operation?
  -- Is there the possibility to add information to the output of
     smart query if the package is installed or not? Sort of like
     "aptitude search" does.
  -- "smart priority --show smart" aborts and outputs a traceback.
     (I've got three channels where the package is available.)
     Is that a known issue?
  -- How does one list all packages in one channel?
  -- "smart search" outputs some packages double. Probably those
     that are available in multiple channels. (E.g., smart itself
     :-).
     Can I prevent that, short of piping the output to uniq?

  -- Can I specify post-action scripts, that are executed after
     installs or upgrades?
  -- If yes, are there contributed scripts? What I really miss,
     e.g., is SUSE's post-action script from apt that checks and
     asserts that all GPG keys in /usr/lib/rpm/gnupg/*.asc are
     really imported. Or to run SuSEconfig, just in case.

  -- Can I specify at install or upgrade that I want to ignore a
     package's lock flag just for this one operation?
     The use case: I lock upgrades for essential packages like the
     Linux kernel, to be able to do other updates smoothly. Then I
     want to do the kernel install -- to do that, I need to take the
     lock flag away, install the update, and then set the lock flag
     again. It would be nice if I'd have an option --no-lock or -o
     lock=false or so for this install operation.

  -- If one calls "smart upgrade --check", one gets as output that
     there are no upgrades even if there are some. One needs to add
     '*' as an argument to get the real answer.
     Is this really intended?

  -- If an upgrade wants to install a package and I want to know why
     it does so, how would you do that? E.g., when I did the first
     big update sweep (after DVD install, no online update with
     zypper) with smart, it installed libgsf from DVD. But there are
     no package that requires libgsf. So, why on earth did it select
     that package for installation?

  -- What is the difference between --check and --check-update for
     "smart upgrade"?

To be honest, at first glance I don't see if smart is really better 
than apt. I see lots of areas where the two tools are similar, and 
the differences are more a matter of taste or of habit. I'm aware 
that coming from an apt background, some quirks may need to get 
used to. E.g., I like the output of apt-cache policy better than 
smart install --explain. The post-update framework of SUSE's apt is 
IMHO better, too (see my rpmkey question above).

But so far, I've not seen a feature set where smart is 
substantially better, that would entice me to switch from apt. (I 
also run Debian servers here, to use apt both for Debian and for 
SUSE is thus of some value.)
Therefore -- what do you see as your switch-to-smart advantages, 
compared to apt?

I hope that my questions don't come across as irritating; I'm
really curious, what I did miss and where I did not understand the
available help texts and documentation.

Best,
	Joachim

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Joachim Schrod				Email: jschrod at acm.org
Roedermark, Germany