[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

[Michael Scherer]

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.

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 ). 



-- 
Michael Scherer