Introduction
The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the problem of managing software upgrades and installation. This tool works in all major distributions and will bring notable advantages over native tools currently in use (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc).
Notice that this project is not a magical bridge between every distribution in the planet. Instead, this is software offering better package management for these distributions when working with their native packages. Using multiple packaging systems at the same time (like rpm and dpkg) is possible but would require packages from those systems to follow the same packaging guidelines. As this is not the case at the moment, mixing package systems is not recommended.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing:
smart
1. <programming> Said of a program that does the {Right Thing} in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. (...)
Features
Check the features page.
Documentation
- English
Installing and using Smart with Fedora, by Rehan Khan
- Brazilian Portuguese
Smart is still missing good documentation. We hope to provide it soon.
Get Smart!
If you want to grab the source code for Smart, the following files are available:
If you're looking for prebuilt packages for your distribution, these links may help you:
Packages for Fedora Core 3+ and Enterprise Linux 4+, by RPMforge/rpmrepo
Packages for Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Linux, by ATrpms
Packages for Debian, by Michael Vogt
Packages for CCux Linux, by CCux Linux
Packages for your Linux distribution (send links!)
Development Repository
Smart is being developed in a Bazaar repository in Launchpad.
To check it out, execute the following command:
bzr branch lp:smart
To browser the code, or see the history and so on, go to:
Mailing List & Unofficial forum
You may subscribe to the mailing list by:
Using the web interface,
Sending a message to smart-subscribe@labix.org
Messages to the list should be sent to smart@labix.org (subscribers only).
Archives can be found at:
Current mailing list (starting from September/05)
Old mesages (up to September/05)
Issue Tracker
Using the issue tracker you may:
The issue tracker has moved some time ago. The old issues are still available. Please, do not post new issues in the old tracker.
IRC
Talk with the developers and other Smart users at #smart on irc.freenode.net.
Author
Gustavo Niemeyer <gustavo@niemeyer.net>
Credits
Conectiva Inc. - Funded the creation of Smart, and its development up to August of 2005.
Canonical Ltd. - Funded Smart development up to November of 2009.
Unity Linux - Smart development and deployment support.
Wanderlei Cavassin - Conectiva's research & development coordinator, who belived the project was viable and encouraged the author to work on it.
Ednilson Miura & Herton Ronaldo Krzesinski - Conectiva employees, helped setting up many distributions for tests whenever necessary.
Andreas Hasenack - Conectiva employee, helped as being the first brave pre-alpha tester, and contributed with many ideas, discussions, etc.
Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo - Conectiva board member, helped with the "channel of mirrors" idea and by encouraging the author to build a generic channel.
Others @ Conectiva - Many other people in Conectiva helped with ideas and alpha-testing in general during the pre-release period of Smart development.
Guilerme Manika & Ruda Moura - Ancient Conectiva employees, now board members of the Haxent company, helped by testing Smart extensively in Fedora, reporting many bugs and suggesting changes. Also the original authors of the FAQ.
APT-RPM & Debian - Experience on packaging and ideas for a better framework were developed while the author of Smart worked as the APT-RPM maintainer.
Jeff Johnson - Contributed as being the RPM maintainer itself, and in many discussions regarding packaging theory in general.
Seth Vidal - YUM author, and member of the Duke University, contributed to Smart with the development of the XML MetaData repository format and discussions about it.
Michael Vogt - Currently the maintainer of the Synaptic, used to co-maintain it with the author of Smart. Many of his ideas ended up being adopted in Smart as a consequence.
Sebastian Heinlein - Author of the package icons for Synaptic, that were mercilessly stolen to be used in Smart's graphic interface.
TaQ/PiterPunk at #slackware-br - These guys helped Smart development by explaining details of Slackware practices regarding packaging.
Matt Zimmerman - Debian/Ubuntu developer and co-maintainer of the APT software, helped by shining some light regarding details of the DPKG pre-depends ordering expectations.
Mauricio Teixeira - FAQ maintenance, YaST2 channel maintainer, "tracker cleaner" ;), general suggestions and code contributions.
Jonathan Rocker - Documentation help.