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  • From: Rene Schneider <r_schneid AT gmx.de>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Experiences of a newcomer to SMGL
  • Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 22:54:07 +0100

Hi all,

as you may have noticed, I had quite some problems with my SMGL installation,
maybe many of them due to being new to SMGL and the downtime of the
sourcemage mirror. Unfortunately these problems cost me more time than I was
able/willing to spend on keeping my Linux installation running and up to
date. As a result I decided to switch to an other distro again.

However, I think all you people who work on this project do a very good job
in
solving what I know is difficult problem, building a up to date source based
distro.

Since I took profit from your work (well, I used the distro) I think the
least
I owe you is feedback on what could/should be improved in order to make SMGL
more attractive to other users. So here my comments:

1. The frontend to sorcery is very useful to newcomers.
2. The spell/add functionality in the frontend is nice but annoyingly slow
(time between one add and getting the listing back again). IMO it should be
replaced by the spell/select function with an added "what is this spell"
button.
3. The backround execute caused me some trouble. While installing a large
number of packages (soon after initial install) a menu popped up to select
the languages for some I18N (kde-i18n or locale, or both?), however it didn't
take any input (due to incompatibility of tee and menu program?). I had to
kill it from an other console. This might also be related to the voyeur
option.
4. About the stable grimoire. As I understood the criterion to get into
stable
is that a spell in its version is not changed for 14 days (correct?).
Seemingly as a result of that it was not stable but out of date. Many spells
I installed failed due to changed URLs (sourceforge sites moved their
download section) or new release candidates (due to which the old candidate
disappeared instantly). I think the devel grimoire is currently more stable
than the stable one (at least for a initial install).
5. Spells that failed to install/update should remain in the install queue or
be moved to a new "problem" queue. This would help to track and solve
problems. Now they just disappeared and sometimes the summary of the queue
installation was scrolled too far out of the screen to even notice something
went wrong.
6. A minor thing, as it doesn't concern too many people: it would be nice if
the install ISO contained the raidtools (especially mkraid and raidstart).
Although the necessary kernel modules were available I had to copy them from
a floppy.
7. The quick response and usefull comments on the mailing list helped a lot.

Sorry about so many negative things. Let me emphasise again that these points
are intended as constructive criticism. You're doing a great job and e.g. the
video section is cutting edge compared to the big distros. Carry on.

Thank you,

Rene





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