Just my 2 cents as a user of the 8.1 and 8.2 Software Managers.... I have to agree with those who say "bring it back". I tried using it, and found it extremely counter-intuitive...
1) It displays packages, but you have no idea whether the packages are installed or installable. Since the only button in the window is "Install", I assume they are installable. What do I do if I want to uninstall something ? 2) Having the main window disappear while processing is quite disconcerting. 3) I really liked the idea of being able to display installed versus installable packages, and also updateable packages (new versions of things I had installed) versus things I hadn't installed to begin with. I like to stay current, and the "updateable" display was a way to see if upgrades were available for anything I had installed, as opposed to wading through all the stuff I hadn't chosen to install to find them, assuming I wuold notice them. 4) I happen to like flat lists as opposed to your groups. If I know the name of something (and I usually do) it is much easier to locate in an alphabetical list than to guess in which group you chose to put it. Mandrake Updates doesn't seem to have anything but the tree list. Some of the things I did NOT like about the old SM.... 1) The Define Sources was buggy and confusing. I wanted to be able to point it at any collection of RPMs and have them be accessible to SM, whether or not there was a "synthesis" or "hddisk" file. I understand that you intended it to work with sources you had set up, but I could never see anything in one of those control files for which suitable defaults could not be extracted from the RPM itself. 2) I could never get Cooker to work; it, and various of the other security mirrors would cause SM to report unspecified errors trying to access packages. 3) Error messages were for shit. You got told that things failed - never why or what you could do about it. That said, at least it offered the functionality. The new one doesn't. It may be the start of something great, but it doesn't strike me as good enough to be released, even in a beta, as a replacement for the existing SM. If you want to put it out there for testing, fine. Just don't pull the old one and claim that this replaces it.
