Hi,
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" ?
I mean the same here in both cases: apt's resolver seems to always prefer %{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} and does not take %{ARCH} into consideration at all. This is a problem because it differs from zypp's behaviour, which prefers %{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} during system upgrades only and %{ARCH} otherwise. Currently only the glibc packages with their strange release numbers are triggering this problem, but I really wonder what will happen if the first architecture-specific (e.g., x86-only) updates arrive. Just to make it clear, the situation has changed in this respect with SL 10.1. Until 10.0 the repos were not "really" biarch, but now they are. And it's not a personal attack against anyone, technical answers like yours are highly preferred.
That's nonsense, at least with a non-zypp package manager that supports biarch, like smart.
Yes, this is correct and was never questioned.
It's not "migrating people away", it's giving people a package management frontend that actually works.
There is no disagreement here, I'm happily using smart myself. I'd just like to point out that zypp is the one SUSE engineers have under their control, so this is the one they can actually fix, and there might be subtle behaviour differences with alternative package managers. People should be prepared for such cases, and it would be a pity if problems caused by differently behaving package managers strengthen the feeling that "package management doesn't work in SL 10.1". Andreas Hanke -- Bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten sparen: GMX SmartSurfer! Kostenlos downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer