Smart Package Manager: a better mousetrap (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Smart Package Manager: a better mousetrap (Linux.com)

Posted Jul 14, 2006 17:37 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (guest, #3659)
Parent article: Smart Package Manager: a better mousetrap (Linux.com)

I'm not following the hype. From what I can see, the only advantages of Smart over apt are:

Support for Slackware packages (apt already has .deb and .rpm)
Parallel download and decompress (apt already does resume)
Telnet (??!!) backend for downloads (apt can mix multiple HTTP, FTP, CD and local/NFS file sources)
Better dependency resolution in one or two extremely rare corner cases

With all of the rough edges, why not just tweak apt to get the same results?

Furthermore, apt is not a stationary target. It recently added differential Packages download, so one need only download recent changes to the Packages files instead of the whole thing. Does Smart have this?

Like I said, I'm not following the hype...

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Smart Package Manager: a better mousetrap (Linux.com)

Posted Jul 14, 2006 20:41 UTC (Fri) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]

Well I can't say I have a definitive answer for you, personally I like
the "cleaner" interface smart gives you over the several apt commands you
have to learn, but that's pretty minor of course.

I do know that for the Redhat/Fedora distros we've had apt-rpm for some
time now and recently yum was made the official package manager.

And if you listen to the managers of several large Redhat/Fedora
repositories they are always complaining about yum and they always
preferred apt. BUT there are several cases where apt just doesn't work
right, they might be corner cases but they happen often enough,
situations where apt just doesn't know what to do or even worse, does the
wrong thing.

I've always looked very carefully at the output of apt, just before
saying "Yes" to go ahead and install, upgrade and remove packages.

Smart just does a better job, I've never had any problems with it and if
the ATrpms mailing lists are any measure others seem to have the same
experience.

Doesn't mean it's perfect though, for one it's SLOW, really really slow.
Not a problem when only a couple of dozen packages need to be updated,
but forget about upgrading your system from FC5 to FC6 with it!

The ATrpms repository maintainer normally his this advise for a major
upgrade like that:

1. use "apt dist-upgrade" to do most of the work
2. afterwards do "smart upgrade" to clean up any problems apt left

Smart Package Manager: a better mousetrap (Linux.com)

Posted Jul 15, 2006 8:27 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

"You want to eat hippopotamus, you got to pay the freight" In my opinion,
the reason apt works for Debian and Ubuntu and doesn't work for the RPM
based distributions is two fold: 1) It was grafted on 2) Most other
distributions didn't pay enough attention to dependency matrices and are
suffering now. Debian packagers are constrained to fit any new package into
an existing tightly controlled system and to take note of interdependencies
in order to get the package into the distribution. A relatively small update
to a system library can thus result in a huge number of changes across the
distribution == lots of updates to lots of packages but should result in
internal consistency and installability. Don't like installing packages
"raw" with dpkg and dselect: develop apt: don't like apt, develop aptitude:
want a gui - develop synaptics and now adept. Far too many package
managers/guis to deal with packages but they build on each other and,
crucially, on a tightly controlled list of dependencies which feeds them
all. The other factor is that, if I need virtually any application, I can
download it from Debian and know it will work without me having to dig
around third party repositories to find some library or other - the
dependencies are pulled in at the same time.

Smart faster than apt

Posted Jul 16, 2006 4:40 UTC (Sun) by rise (guest, #5045) [Link]

Oddly enough it's significantly faster on my system (openSUSE 10.1 with 2291 installed packages and quite a few repositories) than apt. Perhaps this is a scaling issue, taking better advantage of gobs of memory & cpu, or some issue with rpm backends versus dpkg, but I'm not losing any speed to using it. I also find that "smart --shell" makes a big difference if you're doing several operations - your system ends up doing less work with a set of upgrade/remove/install operations followed by a commit. There are also a few nice little bits like "ls -n" after an update to get the list of new packages added to repositories.

In general I'm very happy with Smart. My initial experiences early in its development were positive, but it was too unstable to use. I gave it another try during the openSUSE 10.1 package management fiasco (Novell? Listen to those German engineers) and it's been flawless ever since. Apt, YOU and zen-updater are gone from my normal routine now.