When it comes to package management - be "smart"!

[Void Main]

I can't believe I haven't run into this until now. I was compaining on the FreshRPMS list about the apt package for FC4 being missing for the last several months from rpmforge, dries, dag (Which Dries fixed for me BTW) when Brett pointed me to a new (to me) package resolver/installer called smartpm. This thing is pretty incredible. Smart supports several repository formats and several package formats for the different platforms. For instance, I can point to APT and YUM repos for FC4 and on Debian you can point to your APT repos and it supports Deb packages, etc. It's also supposed to work with Slackware (slack packages).

You can use it from the command line, from a built in CLI shell or from a GUI (that resembles Synaptic somewhat but actually seems better in a few ways I found right off the top). It's actually supposed to work better than the other tools (apt/yum/etc) in that occassionally there will be problems that those resolvers can't handle. Smart is supposed to be able to resolve dependency issues where the others can't, and supposedly you can even mix repos that will cause major disasters if mixed using the other tools.

Ah why am I wasting my breath when it's all out there:

A nice writeup by Dag:
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=29161
Home site:
http://www.smartpm.org/

Mind you I've only played with this for a couple of hours now, but I am rapidly becoming a fan. Have fun!

[Basher52]

looks very interesting, gotta take a peek at it

[dishawjp]

I've been watching this for a while on the Fedora development list. I've read that the people who developed Synaptic are the ones who've taken up the development of Smartpm. There's some talk of including it in Extras when FC5 comes out, but many are opposed to having yet another updater (along with apt4rpm, yum and the broken up2date) in one distribution. A lot are advocating for pup which is the GUI front end for yum.

However the Fedora developers decide to move, I think that when smartpm matures it will be the way to go!

Just my $.02

Jim

[Ice9]

This is something that would be nice to have for Debian too!

However I can't remember NOT finding a particular package in the incredibly large amount of .deb repositories out there ...

[Void Main]

Ice9, there IS a smartpm for Debian. In fact I don't know why I posted it in the Fedora section.

dishawjp, I will never use YUM and I am still upset that it was chosen to be the core package installer when there was already a very fine and mature one out there (apt). smartpm has the advantage of being able to use most any repository format and it resolves packages better than both YUM or APT at the moment. It already has a graphical installer that works great. I don't know why they waste their time with YUM.

[Void Main]

Moved to General Applications Forum because it applies to more than one distro.

[dishawjp]

dishawjp, I will never use YUM and I am still upset that it was chosen to be the core package installer when there was already a very fine and mature one out there (apt).

I have to agree with you on that one! I do use yum on my court computer since I just use the default repositories and try to keep that install as close to "original" as possible. Also, rather than having automatic updates I kind of babysit that computer during updates since I'm in a bad spot if something goes wrong on that computer. But yum takes FOREVER to update the computer! Other than that, it's OK, I guess, but like you, I never saw the need to move away from apt and that's all that I use on my home computer for updating and installing.

When smartpm is ready for prime time, I'll consider moving to that for all my computers.

Jim

[Void Main]

I think smartpm already is ready for prime time. I use to apt mostly out of habit, and I haven't converted my automated scripts over to use smart yet but when I get a few minutes I plan on doing that. The nice thing about it is you can add any repo types.