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Hi,
- apt-rpm: while some people report bad experiences with it (corrupt RPM database), I personally never had issues with it (but I've been using smart since some time now) and it seems that it's being actively maintained and developed again, and even supports RPM-MD (yum) repositories in its latest versions (though that's not the one shipped on the 10.1 FTP tree)
OK, but then it should be made very clear that this one (apt) is not the one whose resolver engine was designed to work with the repositories provided for SUSE Linux. Especially, it should be made very clear that it is not biarch safe, which YaST/zypp is (or at least, should be).
Yes, apt-rpm not supporting biarch is an issue, forgot about that one. smart is fully biarch-capable, and so is yum AFAIK. What do you mean with "is not the one whose resolver engine was designed to work with the repositories provided for SUSE Linux" ? That there are no apt-rpm repositories for SUSE Linux, except those built my Eberhard on gwdg.de ?
There is a bug 176739 and I blame using non-YaST/zypp package managers for it.
That's nonsense, at least with a non-zypp package manager that supports biarch, like smart. Smart is lightyears ahead of zypp/rug/whatever as far as its resolver engine is concerned.
Some examples of people experiencing this problem (two of them in German, unfortunately):
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=37096 http://www.linux-club.de/ftopic60412.html http://www.linux-club.de/ftopic61119.html
IMHO improving YaST/zypp should be the priority now, not migrating people away from it to alternative package managers (which have different problems that will most probably not be fixed with the same priority by SUSE engineers).
Sure, but... that's ridiculous: zypp *does not work properly*.
So alternatives are needed, now, until zypp is fixed.
The zypp issues are causing havoc amongst the SUSE Linux userbase at the
moment, so we better be happy that there are properly working
alternatives, or the situation would be even worse.
It's not "migrating people away", it's giving people a package
management frontend that actually works.
Of course, no piece of software is perfect, and even smart has some
issues, but from the feedback I get and see, everyone is really happy
with it. Smart's bugs and shortcomings are being fixed as well, of
course not by the SUSE engineers (although cthiel submitted an
enhancement to smart a few months ago ;D), but by the smart project
maintainers.
So, what's best ? zypp that works 20%, or smart that works 99% ?
That being said, again, as I wrote very clearly in my previous mail,
improving zypp is the top priority now, I think everyone totally agrees
on this.
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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