Agreed with most of Benjamin. One thing Id like to say is that Im not expecting this "design" of now to continue in 10.2, as you will have time to work on it, no need for a hack-ish solution, which is agreed by most people Ive asked, non suse people, zmd people, ppl who work in yast, etc. Im referring to the dual repositories synchronization situation, which is clearly a design chosen because of the lack of time due to the 10.1 release and the following sled/sles releases. So if you ask me for ways to improve the design, Id say to forget the way its done now and do the correct way, and not try to "make this one better", as its clear "wrong by principle" having the 2 side by side. Its like having an "official" and a 3rd party manager by default. Based on that draw ( http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/7/78/Package-management-in-code10.png), the solution seems creating a zmd module to yast. At least, seems most logical for me, and yast PM then would no longer be acessing libzypp directly. Besides that, one would need to optimize the helpers and libzypp operation as it was already stated in previous discussions. thats my 2 bits Marcio Ferreira On 5/29/06, B.Weber@warwick.ac.uk <B.Weber@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
One question we have is how the new tools rug, zen-updater and zmd compare to what we had before with YaST Online Update and suseWatcher. We are interested in every feedback ranging from architecture, design or used standards and their enhancements.
Going by
http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/7/78/Package-management-in-code10.png the YaST package management talks straight to libzypp rather than zmd, while rug and zen-updater etc talk to zmd. Presumably this is where the synchronisation issues come from. The package management seems far more reliable when using just rug with yum repositories avoiding the synchronisation.
It seems clear the current situation with yast and zmd frontends working in different ways and synchronisation between them is not the way things should work. Presumably yast sw_single, YOU etc should become frontends to ZMD also. However, I am not sure whether this is possible, I have made my own frontend to ZMD and could not find a way to use the api from something other than mono (if there is please tell me :).
The user interface for package management and updating is also possibly one of areas requiring most urgent attention as this is how many users judge SUSE's package management. The yast sw_single interface is starting to show its age when compared with tools such as Adept and Synaptic (not that these are perfect either) and there is a complete lack of progress bars in the most important of places. There are some very good ideas in a file /usr/share/doc/packages/yast2-packagemanager/pkg-sel-ideas.txt from ~2002 which presumably were never implemented. The current interface does not cope well with multiple online repositories, not to mention the lack of progress bars while downloading large quantities of data. This will get more important still when the build service is completed and something like http://software.opensuse.org/download/repositories/ will be used. As for updating this is something I think windows does right. I think there should be a notification applet for updates and the user should not have to worry about the mechanics of where the updates are coming from or what updates to select (unless He/She chooses to). Oh and having deltarpms back would be nice.
Benjamin Weber
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory-help@opensuse.org