Smart 1.4.1 Hangs When Large Numbers of new Packages

[Anders F Björklund]

Stephen Morris wrote:

>     I occasionally have issues with smart whereby when I have anywhere between 300 - 2200+ new packages in channels, smart's calculation of what needs to be updated/installed when issuing "smart upgrade" appears to never finish. I have been in the situation where I have left the calculation running for more than an hour without it finishing. In these situations I have to use the native Fedora 20 package manager to do the update, which invariably displays the packages to update almost immediately. This issue is not unique to Fedora 20, I have had this issue with every version of Fedora from Fedora 18 plus I have had this issue with multiple versions of smart up to 1.4.1 under Mandriva when I was using it.
>     Has anybody else seen this sort of issue?

I'm not sure if smart is very good at handling the large number of packages that Fedora have in one channel, at least the channels that I was using with CentOS had lots fewer available. Keeping the "database" in memory isn't really feasible, and it really starts to hurt when starting and stopping a lot (like for instance PackageKit is doing).

repo id                        repo name                                  status
fedora/20/x86_64               Fedora 20 - x86_64                         38597
updates/20/x86_64              Fedora 20 - x86_64 - Updates               16359
repolist: 54956


That being said, could you try the "upcoming" branch to see if it helps anything ?

https://github.com/smartpm/smart/tree/upcoming

It should have all the patches that were being sent in, since smart-1.4.1 was out...

But I'm afraid that Fedora 20 doesn't do smart*.

--anders


* http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/smart.git says

"Retired on 2013-08-27, because it failed to build for two releases."