Smart my Fedora, dude

published Jun 09, 2006, last modified Jun 26, 2013

The Smart package manager is the best application for software installation and upgrades.

Yesterday, I started to use smart on andrea, my home computer, immediately after I got my cable modem (64kbits, which make the quotes in "broad" band sensible). By the way, I'm paying $50/mo. for this setup.

Sigh. Smart told me it has to download over 900MB of RPM packages to update my system. I'm on day 2, and it still hasn't finished.

But there is a bright side to this story:

  1. Smart is smart (pun intended). So far, smart has been the only automatic package manager (among those I tested in the last 2 years) that didn't choke on my installed package base. In comparison, at least yum choked.
  2. Smart is fast. It's nearly as fast as apt. Forgetting for a moment that it balloons to more than 100MB of memory while resolving dependencies, it's way faster than yum, which insists on connecting to the Internet and downloading a myriad small files.
Keywords
Fedora software packaging reviews Smart package manager system administration RPM