incapable and obsolete APT / Aptitude replacement

kc.ubuntu.cz at centrum.cz kc.ubuntu.cz at centrum.cz
Sun Feb 8 18:35:03 UTC 2009


I would like to ask you a little bit controversal question. As a user I miss in ubuntu a powerfull dependency solver. You can read many discussions all over the web, where users are threatened that RPM causes dependency hell. In my experience it's totaly impossible to manualy create dependecy hell, which has an existing solution, and can't be solved by Zypper/libzypp (opensuse), which is the most powerfull existing dependency solver at all, based on SAT.

But I can create a dependecy hell very easilly in DEB/APT distro. For example: I can add KDE 4.2 repository to Ubuntu, and upgrade to 4.2 from 4.1.3. After that, I can disable KDE 4.2 repository and remove one of the KDE 4.2 package. This result into situation, Apt is totaly unable to solve, even if the solution is obvious a easy to find. there are some comparisons over the web, where you can find that solving capabilities of APT, are the worst of all package management solutions in Linux.

http://www.mancoosi.org/edos/manager.html

SMART (which is available for ubuntu) and even the Urpmi (Mandriva) a more capable than Apt. And zypper is far better that SMART.

http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/309

So. My question is. Is there any plan to replace obsolete APT / Aptitude in Ubuntu? I would love implementing the most powerfull solver => Libzypp/Zypper from Suse, but it would be pleasant to use existing SMART too. Everything would be better than APT.

Both of Zypper and SMART has also capabilities to manage repositories and keys, which is something APT can't. So What are your opoinions of implementing

1) Zypper to ubuntu

2) SMART as a default package manager, if Zypper would be imposible.

Thanks.






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