On Sunday 20 August 2006 15:57, Marcus Meissner wrote:
- We needed to change and enhance the package handling. mostly for multiple repositories, the easy ability to have add-on products, integration of the "update" mechanism with the regular package manager.
Why were apt and smart rejected? Both are mature systems that provide this functionality.
I do not know. We had kinda strict requirements on Patches, Add On Product handling, which might not have been fulfilled by those.
From another post I read somewhere, I understand that one of the big issues with other systems was the lack of patch set handling. As a trivial example, when there is a kernel update, kernel-default, kernel-xen, and kernel-source are collectively bundled as a patch set, so they all get updated. This is not a glaring problem for most, as smaller scale users, but something that Novell needs to provide to the big corporates. It is not something provided by smart or apt. I would have preferred to see Novell pick up something like Smart and implement the missing features rather than create YAMPMS (Yet Another Meta Package Management System) but I suspect I know why. Novell need to create "value add" to sell their product, hence the whole ZENworks. They need to maintain control of this, and if they adopted an externally developed system they lose some degree of that control. -- Steve Boddy