Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/smartpm

• Created: Date(2005-10-31T22:52:04Z) by MichaelVogt

• Contributors: MichaelVogt, ColinWatson, JeffWaugh

• Packages affected: smartpm, apt

Summary

There is a new package managment system availabe written by GustavoNiemeyer called "smart". It is able to deal with debs, rpm, slackware tgz (at the same time). We should consider using it in ubuntu and figure what features (if any) are missing.

Rationale

Smart has a very clean architecture and is used by many other distributions already. It has the potential to become the de-facto standard as a package manager.

Use cases

Scope

We need to evaluate how to make a migration from apt to smart possible and painless and what features/changes are required to get smart as the first-class package manager for ubuntu.

Design

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstand issues

There are various features that we would like to get for smart:

• tracking and auto-removal of unused dependencies (just like aptitude)
• use that in gnome-app-install to be able to automatically remove the dependencies that were installed for a given application
• use the "automatically-installed" info in the problemResolver (consider non-automatic packages more important during conflict resolution)
• support for translated package descriptions (similar to the debian ddtp format?)

• supoprt for "deb-src" type uris (still required with the NoMoreSourcePackages spec)?

• Qt frontend (to make Riddell happy - this requires that it is possilbe to access the konsole terminal widget from pyqt.

• port the tools (gdebi, update-manager, gnome-app-install, update-notifier, unattended-upgrades) to smart
• give the Gtk UI HIG love and improve it in general (model after the synaptic glade file?)
• change the software-properties channel editor to edit channels in a nicer way

• improve the gpg key handling in smart and auto-import the apt-keys (http://lists.labix.org/pipermail/smart-labix.org/2006-June/001055.html)

• make the transition from apt easier by reading apts sources.list file and dynamically track the content there (http://svn.smartpm.python-hosting.com/trunk/smart/plugins/aptchannelsync.py) [make this a two way process]

• switch /etc/cron.daily/apt to smart (but provide the same features)
• the installer makes heavy use of apt-get/aptitude, this needs to be done
• progress-information on installig/fetching via a fd needs to be supported for the installer
• smart-testing team (with jdub in it!)
• the tools like apt-listchanges/apt-listbugs/debconf needs to be continue working
• the package needs to be split into smart{-gtk,-whatever frontend}
• dist-upgrade where the python versin changes may become a issue, we need to check this
• do checking of the time/space consumation in a clean chroot for upgrade/complex installs
• memory is a big issue on the live-cd/alternative installer