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
