Repository conflicts and new smart package manager

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 03:11:17PM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
> I'm very pleased to be able to announce you a new solution to manage 
> packages and repositories. The new Smart package manager is able to let 
> you use different repositories that were not designed to work together. 
> Which was a recurring complaint on this and many other mailinglists.
> 
> You can prioritize repositories or prioritize packages and Smart will 
> handle the conflicts and make a decision based on what's available. It 
> includes a command-line utility (smart) and a GUI that resembles synaptic 
> (smart-gui).

Very impressive -- works amazingly well!

I just installed/updated two hundred packages for FC3 on my 1.6GHz
Pentium M notebook. The parallel downloader is fantastic, and finished downloading
those packages in a fraction of the usual time.  The PyGTK GUI is attractive and
seemed very responsive, which gives it a very professional feel.

Finally, one can create a repository for locally-modified rpms at high priority
and just forget about what's in it until an upgrade conflict develops.  Not
to mention resolving all those darn media player / codec version requirements.

I hope that future versions will incorporate filtering similar to what exists
in synaptic.

The handling of missing GPG keys could also be a bit less cryptic, as that is likely
to be one of the most common source of errors.  Ideally, there would be a mechanism
for retrieving the keys directly from the PGP keyservers.

A few more tweaks and Smart Package Manager will be ready for Aunt Tilly. :-)

Many thanks, Gustavo!

	Bill Rugolsky