/DEV/ZERO

For past few days i am trying out opensuse 11.0. It has some nice qualities like shorter and cleaner boot process, yast control center is good and it has everything prelinked and preloaded so openoffice is also somewhat faster and responsive.

BUT and thats a capital big BUT, its default package manger YaST software installer just sucks.

• It has annoying habbit of refreshing its repos every single time its invoked.
• It takes ever to start the UI.
• The ui operates in a weird "open new window for every other operation" way (this is common to all yast modules).
• The downloader status does not scale to the size of download so for big downloads you keep wondering until the download finally proceeds to 5%.
• The downloader window just does not make any sense, i have no idea what are all the lists of repos and the numbers in front of them, mean and whats more problematic is that i don't care.
• The install works like this, download one pacakge - install -download next -install wasting time between downloads.
• The big downloads almost inevetably time out, and then it waits for user to say retry, unattended big upgrades are impossible on my 256kbps dsl
• On error or next install the downloader has no cached stuff.... it will redownload from scratch next time, even if its a retry for the package in same install session so its a 1 in 50 chance that a 50mb kdelibs is downloaded intact.
• It does not store the rpms locally i can't migrate all my upgrades to a next local machine but have to redownload it there.
• Nothing that can replace apt-cacher
• The repos themselves don't have sane dependancies. All dependencies are merely to satisfy execution of the programm. But the functionality of programm is not considered while specifying deps. e.g. kscope is useless without cscope being installed, but just becuase it uses cscope binary and not a library there is no dependancy  on it. Debian has this done the RightWay(TM).

I can go on and on and on

Finally fed up i installed apt4rpm but couldn't figure out configuration in a sane time frame. So i tried yum next. Although its slower experience than apt its still leaps better. It doesn't solve few inherent problems of rpm based repos. But still makes suse tollerable.

Novell swallow the pride and just switch to apt "for linus' sake"**.

**(its a pun on "for gods sake" :D)