DNF, which may or may not replace Yum [LWN.net]

DNF, which may or may not replace Yum

Posted Jun 28, 2012 9:34 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: DNF, which may or may not replace Yum by niner
Parent article: DNF, which may or may not replace Yum

A very good question. I also wonder what happened to the smart package manager from a few years back.

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DNF, which may or may not replace Yum

Posted Jun 28, 2012 16:19 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

It was popular before zypper showed up. I guess smart rightfully died out, because it was even slower than yum. That is to say, if I have to wait for smart for on 45 minutes on a TM5800 CPU on a dist-upgrade for what "zypper dup" will do under a minute on the very same silicon, something is wrong. IIRC, smart was also a heuristics-based solver like most other implementations. It boasted on its then webpage to solve some cases that apt got wrong, and while that was true, I suppose it were these extended algorithms that eventually were able to drive the computation time to unbearable infinity.

DNF, which may or may not replace Yum

Posted Jul 11, 2012 15:52 UTC (Wed) by criswell (guest, #40091) [Link]

Smart's momentum seemed to take a hit when the lead developer was hired by Canonical and started working on apt related issues in Ubuntu. It's too bad, because you could do some really amazing things with the Smart API.

Way back when, I was the author of (the now orphaned) rpmstrap. I began working on an experimental rewrite of it using the Smart API and found I could do some pretty amazing things (also, scary things- like bootstrap a working system using a mixture of packages from RPM and DEB-based distros :-)

I always felt really sad that Smart never caught on more...