[SM-Discuss] Going back to Gentoo
Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik
ruskie at codemages.net
Wed Oct 29 14:08:59 EDT 2008
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On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> Source Mage Fans,
>
> I've been chatting a bit both here and on IRC recently. I didn't want to
> just "disappear without a trace."
>
Nice to hear that...
> some might even inspire an SMGL enhancement or two. None of this is in
> any way, shape, or form intended to speak poorly of SMGL. It's all
> intended as constructive criticism. I think both distros have their
> strengths and weaknesses.
>
Naturally...
> To be honest, one of the things that attracted me to SMGL is it's name and
> logo. Source Mage sounds much more cool than Gentoo. But, that's not
> really enough. Until the recent layout change I also liked the look of
> SMGL's web site over Gentoo's. No offense, but the current layout looks
> like a generic wiki site with an SMGL logo added at the top.
>
That would be due to wiki software update and nobody yet handling
updating the theme(that's what broke).
> One clear advantage with Gentoo is the number of available packages. A
> recent sync reports I have 13,025 packages in my portage tree.
>
If you count vim, vim-core and gvim as separate then yeah... We could
have that many packages as well.
> currently installed, not to mention a list of new packages, etc. For
> example, here's the last two lines of summary info from the sync I just
> ran:
>
> [*>] == x11-drivers/xf86-video-virtualbox (~1.6.6 ~2.0.2 ~2.0.4 -> 1.6.6):
> VirtualBox video driver
> [N] >> app-portage/porticron (~0.1): porticron is a cron script to sync
> portage and send update mails to root
>
> Sorry for the lack of color and mangled formatting. One can only do so
> much with plain text e-mail. It's easier to interpret with the colorized
> output. The first line shows that version 1.6.6 of xf86-video-virtualbox
> has been unmasked. In other words, that version is now considered stable.
> The last line shows that porticron has been added as a new package. With
> the above sync run there were no updates for any installed packages on my
> box. But, if there were the summary would tell me.
>
We do show the grimoire ChangeLog that lists additions/removals. It
doesn't show the version updates since those are on a per spell basis.
> It seems with gaze I have to ask for each bit of info available for a
> spell separately. Although I did manage to get a little more information
> when searching with something like:
>
> # gaze version `gaze -q search -name vim`
>
gaze -q installed $1
gaze size $1
gaze -q website $1
gaze -q short $1
gaze license $1
gaze long $1
Also usable. Basically provide patches for this or a tool that does it ;)
> Another area where speed is concerned - revdep-rebuild versus cleanse:
> With a little over 300 packages on my SMGL box a cleanse run took well
> over an hour. I just ran a revdep-rebuild on my Gentoo box with 494
> installed packages. Total time was 2:06.17. That's two minutes, not
> hours. Now that might not be a fair comparison. I'm not sure exactly
> what's going on under the hood but I suspect cleanse is performing a much
> more thorough check, sometimes too thorough. Did I mention my recent
> battles with cleanse above?
>
sorcery -> Option -> Integrity Checking -> System Integrity ->
enable/disable whatever you want to speed it up:
basic find check
md5sum check
ldd check
symlink check
Also judging by the name revdep-rebuild it's only meant for reverse
dependencies rebuilding.
> On to configuration file updates - How are configuration file updates
> handled in SMGL? Several man pages say to see confmeld. I viewed the
> confmeld man page but never found any updated files where the man page
> said they should be. I did, however, see the occasional message while
> casting a spell asking me how I wanted to handle a config file update. Of
> course, if the cast was running unattended, it would time out and take the
> default response without me seeing the message. On Gentoo after a merge
> it displays the number of config files that need updating, if there are
> any. If there are any, I can use dispatch-conf to take care of the
> updates.
>
Because you didn't have castfs installed. That uses the confmeld tool.
> On to the subject of USE flags versus playing 297,586 questions. The
> first time around using Gentoo I hated USE flags. After trying some other
> distros, I've come to realize USE flags can be a good thing. Combined
> with emerge's pretend feature one can get things set they way he/she
> wants, then start the emerge and walk away. For example, if I were about
> to install vim I could run an emerge -pv vim, which would list vim and all
> the dependencies that would be installed, along with all their use flags.
Just do gaze CONFIGURE $SPELL and gaze DEPENDS $SPELL and even gaze
PREPARE $SPELL
> Another plus to USE flags - I'm on my third recent Gentoo install. I
> saved copies of my /etc/make.conf and /etc/portage/package.{keywords,use}
> files from the first time around. On the second and third installs I
> could just install everything and all my USE flag preferences were already
> set.
>
Same on Source Mage:
/etc/sorcery/local and
/var/state/sorcery
And you get it all ;)
> I see two drawbacks to SMGL's question/answer sessions. If I respond to a
> question and realize right after responding to it that I should have
> answered differently, I have to cancel and start over. Also, for most
Depends on how one works. Also nothing preventing you from editing files
directly.
For stored queries:
/etc/sorcery/local/depends/$SPELL.p
and
For dependencies:
/var/state/sorcery/depends
> questions timing out and taking the default answer makes sense. For some,
> it doesn't. For example, while I was casting openoffice-bin it wanted
> some form of Java. I picked one and was told that I needed to download
> the file manually. While I was doing so, the prompt asking if I had
> downloaded the file timed out and the cast continued and failed because I
> hadn't finished downloading the file it wanted yet. Those type of
> questions should not time out.
>
Bugs crop up everywhere...
> On to logging - SMGL does a much better job of handling compile logs, etc.
> than Gentoo does. Back when I first used Gentoo, it didn't even save
> compile logs. Now with it's new elog system one can save various logging
> info. But, I haven't found a utility that cleans out old log files like
> cleanse does. One nice Gentoo log parser is genlop. It can do several
> nifty things. If an emege is running genlop -c will show which step it's
> on and if it's something that's been merged before it will even give an
> eta. On a previous Gentoo install I captured the following output while
> merging openoffice:
>
It's a recent addition:
gaze time vim
Casting vim took 4m
As for an ETA I don't really see a point since this varies with system
load, i/o load, CFLAGS, etc...
Why not keep one instance in a virtual machine and just play with that
until you get the hang of it. Hell even provide patches for
functionality you think would benefit.
Sorry to see you go. Hope you'll stick around on IRC(we don't bite).
- --
Andraž "ruskie" Levstik
Source Mage GNU/Linux Games grimoire guru
Geek/Hacker/Tinker
Be sure brain is in gear before engaging mouth.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies.
Ryle hira.
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