[Mageia-discuss] Mageia with Synaptic

[Per Øyvind Karlsen]

2010/9/27 Jan Ciger <jan.ciger at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 9:22 PM, paulo ricardo
> <paulo_ricardogo at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> When the mandrake joined with Conectiva they will throw away the package
>> manager developed by the Brazilian company, the "Synaptic"! Synaptic began
>> to be adopted in debian systems, and these systems now exceed the mandriva!
>
> I think you meant Smart not Synaptics. Smart is still available in the
> Mandriva repos.
I think what might be referred to is that Conectiva was the one who
originally did the port of apt to rpm and was using it.
AFAIK Gustavo Niemeyer who's the author of smart and the last person
who maintained apt at Conectiva, started working on smart as a
replacement for apt due to various issues with it. I don't really know
if Conectiva really got around to replacing apt with smart before
being bought by Mandriva, but the original plan IIRC was for smart to
eventually replace urpmi, but Niemeyer left Mandriva to work at
Canonical only a few months after..

Personally I've been intimate with the code of both apt & smart, and I
must say that
I was much happier doing development on smart, apt code wasn't very nice..
Also apt for rpm development has pretty much died since, with upstream
being pronounced dead and other distributions such as Ark Linux which
used apt in the past, has abandoned it as well as a result..

>
> <rant>
> I just love these kind of pointless threads. I still haven't seen any
> arguments why rpm,urpmi and rpmdrake are bad or what would be gained
> by switching to deb, apt, synaptics or whatever gizmo of the day.
> However, what I *can* see is that most of these "arguments" (or lack
> of thereof) stem from GUI preferences of individual people, not any
> technical merits of one system or another. Making decisions with
> profound impact isn't going (hopefully!) happen on who is the most
> vocal person, so please - either provide real arguments, or stop this
> pointless discussion. Even better, just stop it, because this topic
> was rehashed ad-nauseam on Cooker several times already and I do not
> see what we gain by producing more useless e-mail traffic.
> </rant>
Opting for smart OTOH is something a lot of good arguments could be
made in favor of, but that's really out of scope for this thread
anyways.. ;)

--
Regards,
Per Øyvind