Martin,
You might also want to check out "Sparemint Update Manager" a tool I am
working on which connects to my new in development (perhaps
eternally :-P) sparemint website, http://dev.sparemint.org. It needs to
be download and built yourself with CVS but I released a while ago an
alpha build that is an executable here:
http://www.atari-source.org/?q=node/26
Look for sum-0.1a.tar.gz. I don't recall what features were supported
in this build but you should be able to go to a command line and type
"./sum.prg info" and it should compare your current package set to the
server and recommend a series of updates. If you likes the updates you
can do "./sum.prg upgrade" and it will download and upgrade all those
packages automagically. The CVS version has GEM support if no
commandline arguments are used, but it's unfinished. As I recall you
can do things like ./sum.prg install sed and it will find the latest
version of sed, download and install it. Usual package manager
functionality.
I've been meaning to finish it up and get it deployed but I haven't.
The package set on the dev site should match the current sparemint right
now.
Thanks,
Mark