So we happen to get together some people today in irc, and since the package management is so popular theme these last days, we happen to get a talk about it with some of the developers. Since there has been so much complaining and talk, but so little information, we tried to get some information about it and set a wiki page, and added some of the discussed points. http://en.opensuse.org/Zmd There is also a log about the talk (http://susewiki.apanela.com/zen.log), with too much garbage on it, but Ill let it online if anyone cares to read it. Thanks for all of you who helped. You know who you are. The point was starting some information gathering, and hopefully it will keep growing. So feel Free to complete the page, put infos that are not there, etc. sds Marcio --- druid ### I will try to address the points that were explained: Lots of users were concerned about the current situation of having the zypp (yast) data and the zmd data (like /var/lib/zmd and /var/lib/zypp).This situation of having the metadata twice was said that its because zmd likes to have its own db. Other common point is that they can be very resource intensive and lots of suers are experiencing that. AJ rolled out some beta updates ( ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/aj/10.1-packagemanagement-update-test/) for people to test and heard some reports it solved some problems. Also it was said that Yast module is not a zmd frontend. Instead it uses libzypp directly to install packages. Libzypp provides the dependency solving functionality, and it supports traditional susetags and YUM/rpm-md metadata formats. Zmd has support for other sources too, like redcarpet ones, for example, but can also do YUM metada repositories. Zmd and rug also uses libzypp for dependency solving. Zmd uses an sqlite db */var/lib/zmd/zmd.db to store most of its pertinent data. The libzypp helpers are not written in C++ (and thats the reason its not integrated in libzypp, which is C++ code), but in a separated stage. Zmd interface also works with libredcarpet (as it used to do), so you cant simply go modifying that interface too. It was noted that some of the helpers (like parse-metadata and update-status, for example) seems to be the ones most hogging the system (but it would need to try to do some profiling, so we can stop the I-think-it-is and start the It-is-for-sure). It was also said that due to the close deadline of release, zypp wasnt yet optimized, so there is a big field for improvements in there. Note that from this description it is clear that we have some overlapping of solutions, specially about yum sources, that could be in the future be done using only one solution (which I think is what all people wants, the use of zmd, and a yast frontend to zmd as a common yast module, what currently is the sw_single/online_update module). For the people willing to help with debug, here is how to set debug information (beware of logfiles getting bigger in ./log/zmd-messages.log): $ rug set log-level debug ; $ rug set log-exception-traces true