system/smart/README



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 a general rule,
mixing packaging systems is not recommended.

Smart supports the following repository formats as source channels:

RPM repositories
  RPM System Database (locally installed packages)
  APT repositories for .rpm
  RPM-MD (used by YUM)
  Red Carpet (used by Ximian/Novell)

  RPM Header List (used by RedHat and Conectiva installation CDs)
  RPM Directory (a dir with a bunch of RPMs in it, no indexing required)
  URPMI (used by Mandriva) 

DEB repositories
  DEB System Database (locally installed packages)
  APT repositories for .deb
  DEB Directory (a dir with a bunch of DEBs in it, no indexing required)

Slackware
  Slackware installed packages database
  Slackware repositories 

Mirrors
  up2date (used by RedHat/Fedora)
  Conectiva-style mirror description formats