The SMART way to manage apps

The default Opensuse 10.3 app manager, not sure what it is named - YAST2?, is great at installing and uninstalling apps. But, recyclability is completely ignored. Downloaded rpms are deleted once the installation is complete. And as I found at linuxquestions.org, thanks to google01103, there seems to be no way to modify this behaviour. What this incident also showed me was that basic tools of Linux also are modified across distros, since the help entries quoted by google01103 did not exist on my PC, and neither did the command switches for the rpm command. Very strange.

Google01103 also mentioned an alternative app manager (I was ignorant about the ability to use different app managers in one distro), SMART. SMART is a package that can be installed from YAST2. Since I was not keen on using SMART from the command line, I also selected SMART-GUI package for installation. About 10 MB was downloaded and installed, including dependencies, and after that I could use SMART. To launch it, the command "SMART --GUI" , or the SMART entry under the Configuration menu can be used (though for some reason this stops with a "-gui command not found" error).

As the SMART manual at labix.org mentioned, the default rpm deleting behaviour can be modified with a "smart config --set remove-packages=false" command. To test this I installed a media player PIA. And as promised, the downloaded rpms were located at /var/lib/smart/packages (unfortunately, PIA itself did not make an appearance in any menu, but running the pam command gave the usage options). Interface wise SMART is leaner than YAST2, there seems to be no way to control repositories, so I assume the YAST interface is to be used to modify sources. The first step would be to refresh the cache since otherwise the app list in the repositories are not reflected, and searches end without result.

One lesson which I learnt, was the relevance of the point I made some posts back, that one of the first steps that an user to do after installing a distro is wade through the app list in the distro and try to install all relevant packages before starting out. This saves a lot of time and effort (and bandwidth) later.

Package recyclability is important to avoid redundant downloading of packages to install the same app in different PCs with the same distro. It would seem quite a significant oversight on Opensuse's part. I think, PClinux has such a facility (or was it Mandriva?).