We tend to take for granted that the developer community will make all well over time. That's just not sufficient with problems like the updater issues which as a commercial developer I would have never been allowed to ship by the Quality Control department. What we need now is some statement from openSuSE as to how serious they believe the problem to be and what is the plan to fix it. Waiting for 10.2 isn't an acceptable answer. Publishing an analysis and work around is in order. For example, I see yum is on the distribution media as is smart. Should and how should we be using those packages in the interim? This is a case where silence isn't golden.

Hear, hear!! According to the OpenSuse wiki and bugzilla the patch was supposed to have been available last week. One thing I found of interest was that the developers wanted to kill the new package manager until 10.2, but were overruled by the bean counters.

There is a status meeting Tuesday. It'll be interesting reading the transcript.

leandean: Now this whole thing makes sense. No self respecting engineer would release updater so screwed up. It takes the stupidity of bean counters who are business amateurs to commit this kind of insanity. Hopefully they have learned their lesson and open source can get back to normal best intentions and integrity.

Part of the reason why I think they changed the package manger is the upcoming release of Suse Linux Enterprise 10. They seem to be trying to combine a lot of Suse, Ximian and Novell technology which may not be an entirely good thing if its rushed. Now you can't install Suse without mono and gtk even if you strictly wanted to use KDE, because of the huge dependency on mono in the package manager and gtk in some config tools. Personally I don't think the package manger should have been changed until about Suse 11 and XGL not included until it worked very well with both KDE, GNOME and other DEs or WMs.