Presently discussion is on-going in bugzilla about the architecture of package 
management, mostly wrt. 10.2. I think that we should clarify longer term 
goals. Which imho must be to not have zmd installed by default on openSUSE, 
as it causes problems and unnecessary complexity without adding functionality 
that the openSUSE users need. I'm curious if official people agree with this?

With zypper (cli) and opensuse-updater (updater applet) it is within grasp to 
not have zmd+friends on KDE installations. It's more problematic for GNOME as 
removing zmd would mean no updater applet would be available for them. But 
this should be fixable for 10.3.

Nat Budin did this image to illustrate package management on 10.1:
http://en.opensuse.org/Image:Package-management-in-code10.png

I've done a quick mock-up of how it could look in the future for comparison - 
maybe already in 10.2 for KDE users:
http://suse.linuxin.dk/pm102.png

Whether or not this architecture is feasible for 10.2, depends on the 
stability of zypper and opensuse-updater. Therefore I recommend to test it a 
lot. 

To be able to test it thouroughly we need updates though. One of the lessons 
learned from the 10.1 debacle was that a lot of the problems didn't become 
apparent until we had multiple repositories and update repos to test with.

This repo exists:
http://ftp.belnet.be/linux/suse/suse/update/10.1.42/

But there are no packages there. Would it be possible to provide some sort of 
dummy updates?

Also some repos exist for Factory on the buildservice with newer packages than 
the ones in factory. Which is useful for testing the package management in 
more of a real life scenario.

Note that at the present zypper is missing from factory, but I assume that'll 
be remedied soon.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=216585

At the very least 10.2 users should be able to remove zmd+friends and still 
have cli (zypper) and an updater applet (KDE users only), which in it self is 
one of many improvements in 10.2 over 10.1.

Martin
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