[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

[Thomas Lottmann]

Le 28/09/2010 20:54, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Le mardi 28 septembre 2010 à 20:34 +0200, Thomas Lottmann a écrit :
>    
>> As you have just brought up Smart here, I did remember about it and
>> though about this.
>>
>> Some time ago, there was an employees from MandrakeSoft who was working
>> on Smart and developping it just like RPMDrake has been developped up to
>> now. Yet, back to the previous cost cutting plans the company already
>> did, it was decided to only keep RPMDrake as main package manager and
>> the employee working on Smart was fired, even though Smart was very
>> popular at that time.
>>      
> No.
> The guy you speak about is Gustavo Niemeyer, and he was not fired, he
> left for Canonical after being approached during Europython in 2006. He
> didn't worked long for Mandriva.
>    

Okay, so my brain badly registered the explanations I got from that 
story. All my excuses...

/me thinks of updating his brain's hardware conf to avoid this kind of 
stuff...

> There was some discussions of using smart on Ubuntu too, but Gustavo was
> assigned to work on landscape and storm
> ( http://jamwow.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/my-work-at-canonical/ ).
> Someone from Canonical told me the orm ( ie storm ) was written for
> landscape and later launchpad was ported on it after storm was published
> as "launchpad orm" ( but they couldn't speak of Landscape at that
> time ).
>
> Now, he is working on openstack, afaik.
>
> And well, while smart was new and shiny with original features, I think
> "being popular" is a overstatement. Smart gui is clearly inspired by
> synaptics, and is a little bit too powerful and complex ( and a little
> bit buggy, I fill 4 bugs in 15 minutes of test :/ in that time ).
>    

Thank you for retelling the sotry properly, I was not yet on Linux at 
that time. But I am still quite sure Smart was appreciated for a few 
points, not remembering them...

As the GUI tool is bugged and, on my computer, apparently unusable, is 
it worth fixing it, maintain it, and eventually improve it? I mean, 
there may be a potential in such a powerful tool.

Nothing urgent in that though, just thinking about it since there was 
this conversation.