Synaptic : will it still there in Edgy ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 10:55 +0800, Jerome Gotangco wrote:
> You could always try out SMART in Dapper anyway and give your ideas on
> what you see. It's pretty straightforward, but it unifies package
> management not just for the graphical interface but to the console as
> well. (You could still use your favorite package management system btw
> but smart simplifies some stuff at the surface but a lot is happening
> from the background).

Hmm, I don't think I will install it... because unless it does end up in
Edgy, I won't know I won't be using it anyway.

But if it does end up in Edgy or Edgy+1, then I think I will like it,
because even just on paper, it has several tremendous advantages to me.

1) as you just said, it's not just a GUI for apt or other system, but is
a consistent system that comprises both the GUI and the command line.
I value this a hugely, because a few month ago, I wrongly assumed that
Synaptic and apt-get were perfectly interacting, and that caused me to
destroy my system: I use Synaptic to put some packages "on hold", then
later I used apt-get to for something trivial, which ignored these hel
packages. In the case at hand, that screwed Xorg and removed the whole
Gnome desktop... oops... ;-)
So with SMART, it seems that I would have total peace of mind, whatever,
whaaaatever I do with with the GUI, it will not bypass or be ignored by
the command line tools, and vice versa. 

2) It works with RPM packages. Since there are now 2 distros that fight
for Desktop Linux supremacy: Suse and Ubuntu, one with RPM and the other
with DEB, this SMART program is the opportunity to add a tad more
interoperability/standardisation on the Linux Desktop, which is very
important to speed up its development and adoption. Well, I feel.

Any of these two things alone would make me extremely happy with SMART,
regardless of how I like the look and feel and usability of the GUI.

Now, as far as suggestion go, after 18 month of experience using
Linux/Ubuntu, I know what I would love to see in my ideal package
manager:

3) When I ask to remove a package, I would like to bloody REMOVE the
package ! (remove whatever dependencies where pulled when it got
installed). If installing package "X", pulls 54 other packages and the
whole thing add up to 50.00MB, when I ask to remove "X", I expect the
system to remove 55 packages and free 50.00MB, not 12 packages and
9.04MB.

4) As times passes, I end up installing many programs by hand from the
repositories. Say I install programs A, B and C. I would like to have a
filter that shows me A, B and C (and ABC ONLY, NOT all their
dependencies !), so I can have a quick overview of all the stuff I
installed myself. 

5) Be able to save this list to disk. Then for example I re-install the
system, I load the list from the disk, and I can select individually
from the list what packages I want to install, or just re-install
everything. Some of this functionality is present in Synaptic, I think.

6) Be faster than Synaptic. Every time I install or remove a package
with Synaptic, it's greyed out for several seconds after the package has
been installed or removed. I dunno what it's doing, but it's slow.

7) When browsing the packages in list view, add a column to indicate
what repository a package is from (main/restricted/universe/multiverse).
If a package is from a non official repository, make it SUPER OBVIOUS,
to avoid screwing the system with crappy packages by mistake...


I don't know if points 3 to 7 are addressed in SMART, so if they aren't,
and SMART does end up eventually in Edgy, then these would be my very
first wish-list bugs...


--
Vince