OpenSUSE 10.1, yast and installing an update

[Kurt Granroth]

Alan Dayley wrote:
> Interesting that it did not "automatically" find the new versions from
> the new repository.  Is it normal to have to over-ride previous with the
> new like this?

I've been a long-time SUSE fan, but even I can't find much to love about
YaST when dealing with package management.  I switched to using 'apt'
back in the SuSE 9.0 days and more recently, switched to 'smart'
(against a few 'apt' and 'yum' repositories).

http://labix.org/smart

The smart package manager is relatively new, but shows a huge amount of
promise.  It's sort of a  "meta" package manager in that it doesn't
define it's own repository or package format but instead uses existing
ones.  As I mentioned, it supports 'apt' and 'yum' (and a bunch of
other) repositories and deb, rpm, and slackware tgz packages.  What
makes it better than using the "native" tool for the given repository?
Two main advantages, from my POV:

1. It is *very* intelligent about resolving dependencies.  They have
some good case studies in the smart README:
  http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html
I've not run into those particular problems with apt, before, but I have
run into similar ones and so far, my smart usage has been problem free
in that regard

2. 'smart' has MUCH better mirror handling than any other package
manager.  That is, you can add a bunch of mirrors to a 'channel' and it
will profile the speed for each and prioritize downloading packages
based on that.  And there's more!  It will also download packages in
parallel on multiple mirrors.  This is a huge time saver when dealing
with SUSE since most of the full mirrors are in Germany.  In my
experience, when downloading multiple packages at a time, I can easily
sustain download speeds 2 to 5 times faster than with apt alone.

I believe that the OpenSUSE project is starting to support 'smart' more
officially lately.  I don't have concrete details on that, though.