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 directory 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 directory 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
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