Re: Smart Package Manager

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 06:09:16PM -0200, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> Oh, and contributions/suggestions/bug reports from you, power users,
> is of special interest at that moment.

Here's my looked-at-it-for-half-an-hour comments. It's kind of a
stream-of-consciousness narrative....

  - looks pretty nice overall. I like the various tree views in the GUI;
    perhaps one based on comps.xml groups could be added? I think that's
    the most useful, as the RPM groups (in Fedora, at least) are a mess.
    (The "High level interface" suggested in the IDEAS file....)

  - I wonder about the package name -- perhaps it should be
    "smartpm-0.27-1.i386.rpm" instead of just 'smart'. I'm concerned about
    confusion with the hard drive S.M.A.R.T. thing -- there's a "smartd" in
    Fedora Core, for example.

  - the binary .so module in the source RPM is horribly, horribly ugly.
    Please don't do that! Instead, perhaps a separate package which actually
    contains the rpm source and the necessary patch?

  - I'm not so keen on not having a human-managable config file. This may
    make it a pain for us to push out config changes to our users. 

  - I like the "Fix all problems" menu entry in the GUI. All programs
    should have that. Or actually, there should just be a big button
    on the side of the computer....

  - tested on a freshly installed FC3 system, and attempted to update the
    100+ packages that need it. It's taking a very long time to download
    them all -- the first 60% went very quickly, but then it seemed to have
    exhausted all of the fast mirrors and got everything else from slow
    mirrors on the other side of the world. Now, it's stuck at 95%. If it
    doesn't do anything soon, I'm going to cancel.

  - Random thoughts while waiting -- it'd be nice if the "Operation
    Progress" columns were sortable. And there ought to be a column for
    package name (and possibly package file name) in addition to the URL.

  - the package download speed column seems to say "stalled" a lot, even
    when the progress bar is moving quickly.

  - hmm. well, pressing the cancel button has no effect. And ctrl-c in the
    window where I ran the 'sudo smart --gui' command causes a traceback but
    leaves the window up. Well, time for 'kill'.

  - okay. Running again picks up where things left off, and picks good
    mirrors. nice.

  - wait, what's this? "alsa-lib-devel-1.0.6-5.i386.rpm: public key not
    available". Press okay, and nothing happens. Hmm. I guess it is aborting
    this whole transaction? Not the clearest message....

  - Okay, added keys with rpm --import, and hit apply changes. There we go!
    Hmm, what does it mean to "clean" a package? Well, anyway, everything
    seems to have gone okay.

  - Oh -- when appying updates, the "change summary" dialog comes up twice,
    once before "apply marked changes now", and once after. That's odd.

  - UPDATEDEFAULT is set to yes in /etc/sysconfig/kernel. Both the 678 and
    681 updates were installed, and I ended up with the _older_ of those
    as the default. Oops.

  - if I run it not as root, the GUI lets me pretend do things, but they
    don't actually _do_ anything -- just silently nothing happens.

  - dialog boxes should be in the order "Cancel - Okay" instead of "Okay -
    Cancel".

  - the mirror vs. channel thing is confusing. The FAQ seems to imply that
    The "mirror" menu is for configuring files 

  - there's a --log-level command line option, but nothing actually seems
    to get logged to syslog. Odd. Logging everything that happens is pretty
    important to me.

  - I will have to look at the 'modular interfaces' thing -- it'd be nice
    to have one designed to run from cron and  generate pretty e-mail
    messages to root.
 

More later. Perhaps in a more organized way. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           [email protected]        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>