Monday, October 17, 2005

» SmartPM on SUSE: call for testers

Already heard of smartpm, the "Smart Package Manager" ? No ? Then you must check this out. Just look at those features :) To make it really short: Smart is a package management frontend (just like YaST2, y2pmsh, apt, yum, urpmi) that supports installing packages from local directories, local files, yum (rpm-md), apt (and apt-rpm), urpmi repositories onto rpm, dpkg/deb and slackware pkg. What's so cool about it ? Didn't notice yet ? ;) Well, it can handle various backends and metadata repositories and... it does so without actually requiring nor using apt-get or yum. It includes its own implementation of those repository formats. It's all written in Python (with just a small .so for optimization of large repositories). It also has a command-line interface, a shell interface (with tab completion) and a GTK2 GUI (that looks a lot like synaptic). It comes preconfigured with my repository, as well as Packman. Still not curious about it ? It can also manage mirror sites for repositories. Very easily. And it will pick the best mirror. And you know what ? It needs a lot of testing on SUSE Linux, so if you use that distribution, go ahead, and install my smart RPM for SUSE Linux (10.0, 9.3, 9.2, 9.1 and 9.0). Finally, Christoph Thiel has added smart to SUSE Linux 10.1 alpha ("EDGE") - it will appear in alpha2. Go get it, use it, provide feedback ;)

3 Comments:

Blogger Loki said...

smart does not support YaST2 and YOU repository metadata, which is more or less a non-issue because you also have the APT repositories on ftp.gwdg.de for the base, security and update repositories.

Maybe someone will implement a smart backend for those formats (at least Christoph Thiel has sent the specs to Gustavo Niemeyer, the smart maintainer), but until then you can use the APT repositories.

What "scripts you can use with yast" do you mean ?

07:52  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

liquidat, do you mind if I translate your guide in italian ? I'll post it with references on my blog and in the the guide sections of http://www.suseitalia.org.

bye !

13:18  
Blogger kOoLiNuS said...

So, today i've done a quick translation of your post ... I've added it on my personal italian blog [http://www.koolinus.net] and I've submitted it for approval to an italian SuSE users portal [http://www.suseitalia.org].

If I get any advice or anything to make it better I'll keep you informed.

From me, I just can't wait to be @home to play on my SuSE laptop

Thanks again

14:46  

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