I have a friend who is tentatively dipping toes into the world of openSUSE with some old laptops in the hope of resurrecting them and making them usable. Being old laptops, they don't have built-in NICs but what they do have is a PCMCIA/CardBus slot each. My friend has a couple of NetGear WG511T adaptors - one for each laptop. This is the same piece of kit as I use on my laptop when I'm at home to be able to talk to my sexy NetGear router at the full 108M (although that only works in Windows at the moment).

The WG511T is supported using the MadWiFi modules, the repository for which one can add in either YaST/zypper or Smart. This should mean that the whole process of keeping one's wireless drivers up to date (and so, keeping oneself online) is pain-free from here on in but nothing could be further from the truth. Please note that the following applies to any repository other than the official online update channel - any repository from the Build Service for example is also affected.

The thing is that, if someone's not a hard-core Linux guy, you want them to be able to use the 'official' tools to manage their system. That means using YaST, its software management module and its online update module (why these still have yet to be combined is simply beyond me). As I've said, you can add any repository you like to the list of repositories and sure enough, they then show up in the software installer so you can install, in this case, madwifi-kmp-default and let it get on with it.

The trouble is that that's then it. You don't get any further updates to that package you installed because YaST's online update doesn't ever touch a third-party repo. That's okay though because we have a command-line tool (ooh, that's going to pull in the new users, isn't it?) called zypper. Trouble is that that doesn't do it either. I discovered this earlier today while trying to upgrade mail-notification from 4.1 to 5.0 (it's in GNOME:Community). I executed zypper ref ; zypper up and was told there was "Nothing to do". However, when I then executed zypper in mail-notification, it went ahead and installed the new version, along with its new -lang sub-package.

So, why not have my friend use Smart? Well, apart from the reasonable question of "will openSUSE's own tools not allow me to do this?", there are issues with Smart itself. Smart is undoubtedly very powerful but it rather assumes that you really know what you're doing. In the above example, if there had been a kernel update but the madwifi packages had yet to be updated to match, Smart would remove madwifi unless you explicitly told it not to, leaving you offline suddenly.

This needs sorting out, YaST's online update moduke ought to have the option of using third-party repos as well as the main update channel. Where upgrading one package would result in another being removed, a question ought to be asked explicitly about whether you want to proceed with that upgrade or not. What is at stake is whether people trying openSUSE stay with it because this is something thought ought just to work and currently does not.

It's very nice of "Bishop" Andrew to promote me

I think Peter may have something to say about it though...

With help from a combination of sbrabec and darix, I've fixed the lion's share of the Expansion Errors we'd been seeing on GNOME:Community/openSUSE_10.?+GNOME_[UN]STABLE by tinkering with the project metadata. This means that a raft of packages that wouldn't update if you had one of those variations of G:C setup in $PACKAGE_MANAGER will now be upgraded the next time you update.

Forgot to mention yesterday, changed the flag for the default edition of Planet SUSE from a US/UK combo to the UN to indicate that it's not just English but any language other than German or Spanish.