[SGVLUG] Any1 Familliar with smartpm Package Manager?

[Larry Hart via SGVLUG]

Well, yesterday I asked in another LUG forum, but no1 answered, so I am hoping 
some1 here has run this alternative to dpkg.  You see, my dpkg has been messedup 
for awhile, so I went looking around packages.debian.org  and saw an item 
"smartpm" which after installing, runs as "smart" Anyway, it only seems to 
realize some packages which are already installed locally. From an avid 
description, it handles dipendancies much better than dpkg. But as an example, 
if I type
smart install lynx
it says something like no matching packages. So I can only suppose I must 
somehow tell it where to hookup with sources.list
I also looked around the Debian bug tracking system, and items are not newer 
than 2011 or earlier. But still you would think I should be able to get this 
working with some repos. Thanks so much in advance. And by the way, when running 
dpkg related, I get an error about no sandbox on the system.
Hart