“The Smart Package Manager hopes to beat the native package
management applications for distributions like Red Hat, SUSE, and
Debian at their own game. Still in beta, it has support for most
major GNU/Linux package and repository formats, with a modular
codebase that hints at further compatibility. Smart introduces many
innovative and useful ideas, but its killer feature, with which it
purports to excel beyond its counterparts, is the algorithms it
uses to select packages and versions that best resolve dependencies
and ensure cooperation between the hundreds of applications and
libraries on a user’s system.“In most GNU/Linux package management schemes, user-selected
packages are fetched from a list of sources, be they CDs or remote
repositories, and installed along with other packages on which they
depend. Each has slightly different package formats, protocols, and
administration interfaces…”