Odd question ?,...

The idea is not only dependencies, but to finnish once for all the Fedora, or Suse or Mandriva RPM jungle. There should be only *ONE* package. Other distros wont comply because much of the mentality is the same that drove Unix to almost extinction. So why not Mandriva have 'Smart Channels' from all those binary or sources, rpms,debs,dpcks..., already out there and transform that to something like a *autoexectuble file* that could not only cleanly install the binarys but also compile from source and then install... perhaps some how merging with the 'Autopackage' framework would be a good idea, since they dont have a package manager engine defined... and merging projects is something sorely missied in Linux, and cause of fragmentation!...

All in all Smart is a superior Package Manager,period.

Transform it into a *Standard* would be simple once even users from other distros, and OSes(yes Windows, why not?), would start to sign to Mandriva Club to have a "Universal Repository". Perhaps that wouldn't happen soon with so closed mentality in the Linux world, and with Distros pushing so hard for the NIH syndrome. But will explode when the Low tech masses have *acess*. And IM(very)HO, low tech masses will have *acess*, or Linux will dye, because Microsoft will show again that server cannot stand proudly alone, superior, and untoched, and make sorry once again all those NIH priests.