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  • From: "Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT optimaltec.com>
  • To: evraire AT tuwg.com
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Interesting Read
  • Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 15:20:38 -0400

evraire AT tuwg.com wrote:

It's funny you should mention that as I too am considering moving away from
SourceMage and I wasn't going to speak up about it. I happen to be a user of
SourceMage since just before the split off of Sorcery. At the time I was
tired of bloated binary distributions like RedHat and was looking for
something a little more lean and fast, and the promises a source-based
distribution offered were just too good to pass up.

What do you mean by "bloated" here? Everyone seems to have their own definition...

Personally I run into problems every time I do a system-update. At first, I
attributed it to the early state of development of the tools and decided to
wait it out, hoping things would improve with time. Unfortunately for me,
they haven't: just last weekend the system-update hosed my Gnome2 desktop.
I've managed to get Gnome2 back up again, but unfortunately Mozilla has yet
to recover. It seems to cast totally fine, but when I run it it pops up and
dissapears instantly. I'm still tracking that problem down. Other bits and
pieces of my system are MIA... I'm pretty sure ALSA is down again, but I
didn't have time to check it out. I haven't had a working trash can on my
Gnome2 desktop since my first update of it.

I do "sorcery system-update" on two PCs every other day (almost), and both are on devel grimoire. The error with Mozilla that you're describing is a very old one, has something to do with the existing profile. If you try to start is as root it'd most likely start. Please try searching the archives for the recipe.

These little issues are a real pain and take up a lot of time to work out.
Perhaps I'm not an advanced enough Linux user to figure them out
instantaneously, perhaps I've tinkered with my system too much and rendered
it unstable, or perhaps I've just cast/uncast too many applications that I
wanted to try out. Perhaps going from Sorcery to an early SourceMage,
through the gcc, glibc and db major upgrades, the grimoire splits, etc. is
too much for one system to handle and I should just reinstall SourceMage
using the latest ISO... who knows, I may just do that! I'm certainly NOT
looking forward to a reinstall, as one of the advantages I've always
appreciated of Linux (and despised of Wintendo) is not needing to reinstall
at regular intervals.

That's what I did on my laptop, and the only big problem I'm having is some bug in init system which doesn't allow this machine to shutdown or restart cleanly, and the `apm' daemon takes forever to stop..

I can hear the unspoken question already, and no I haven't filed these
little issues with Bugzilla. Honestly, I'm not sure whether it's a
SourceMage problem or me tinkering with config files... in fact, it's
probably a combination of the both. Also, these little problems have
probably been building up as I might have left one or two unresolved at each
updates.

What kind of tinkering is it? Maybe you could elaborate so that we could address these issues? Sorcery is not the best tool from usability point of view...

Anyway, the bottom line is I'm unhappy with the rough edges of my system and am
considering moving to another distro looking for something a little more polished. I
don't think I could go back to a binary distribution, so I was considering Gentoo as my
first alternative as it's been around a lot longer and has a much larger package base.
You may recall a quick post a while back where I asked a user who switched from Gentoo
to SourceMage "why?". Unfortunately, having been burnt by Kyle and seeing
the same thing happening on Gentoo's side isn't very encouraging and has me worried.
I'll probably try a fresh SourceMage install first.

AFAIK Gentoo doesn't provide that much choice in software configuration, you're getting a much more fixed thing. I may be wrong, and I'm clearly biased ;-).

So what improvements would I like to see in SourceMage? More spells would
be nice, but I think we need to work on quality before quantity. I think the
way spells install by default should be tweaked to appeal to less advanced
users and should be completely functional out of the box (like a working
trash can). I think upgrades need to be more fluid: I should be able to do a
system-update without dreading the post-update fixups.

The responsibility to make things work for a novice user is shared between us and the software creators. We don't have a Red Hat's muscle in customization, so obviously we couldn't try and get out with something like BlueCurve or whatever it's called.

I think we should look at other distros and see what we could incorporate into ours to improve it. I like that Gentoo doesn't overwrite config files during an update, then assists you in merging the changes. I like the idea of the USE flags: they're a means of describing what you want out of your system as a whole to the OS so it can make better "decisions" on how to install packages. For example, you can specify you're a Gnome/GTK user and individual packages can compile with the GTK interface and not the QT one, or you can specify your a KDE/QT user and get the reverse, or even specify both. In SourceMage you're prompted for these things, so you can still choose them, but it makes it harder for unattended installs. Plus, if I've got QT, why not go ahead and build the QT interface for me instead of asking me about it?
They way sorcery is build, optional_depends will default to "yes" if the dependency is installed. That means that if something depends on QT /and/ is using conventional autoconf/automake configuration system (so that we can apply optional_depends to it), the QT interface would be built by default. If the software is not using autoconf/automake it's obviously a more involved spell for which not everyone has time. After all, we're all "scratching our itch" in OSS development...

For that matter, in general if I've got a library already installed why would
a package ever prompt me to build optional components that depend on them
, they should just do it! (MPlayer comes to mind, as it has many optional
codec dependancies.) I guess I like the hands-off of package
installation/updates in Gentoo as well, which goes back to my point of having
better defaults.

Please don't provoke wrong attitudes. Sometimes plug-ins can't work together, or change the behaviour of a spell entirely (like if you build OpenLDAP with cyrus-sasl and you keep your system accounts in LDAP database, you'll be surprised to find out that it doesn't start). This distribution is for administrators as well as for users, so please don't rock the boat this way :-).

I used Gentoo for comparison because I've been evaluating it the most
recently, but I think there are other distributions we can look to. RedHat's
desktop is really getting slick, and Knoppix' hardware support is simply
astounding. Other distros have Mozilla up and running with Java and other
plug-ins easily, not to mention the latest version of OpenOffice. I have
issues with all of these! Granted, what we're trying to do is infinitely
more complex (source vs binary), but it's all part of smoothing out the edges.

Java and Mozilla are both huge pieces of software, and Java is not open source. So, did you want open source or convenience, after all? Lobby Sun, or get a j2sdk-bin installed. It's that simple. In regards to OpenOffice, we can only dream that it becomes much more compilable so to speak. It's one of the most complex spells I think. We're successfully tapping in the wisdom of LFS, because obviously they have many smart people with some time on their hands to figure out how to build things like OO and Java, but our own capacity is unfortunately limited for this kind of research. Not that we're not planning on doing this, yes we are, it's just that things are moving at a slower pace, and I understand the problem of not being able to "read this Word document right now". I've been there with SourceMage, and I use combination of rdesktop to other PC and OpenOffice to be productive. Nobody at work notices any problems with this.

SourceMage isn't all bad though, and that's why I've stuck around for so long. First
off, the community is top-notch! Very friendly, very helpful, very courteous, and very
"fun"! You know they love this distro and it shows. I love that! Second,
IMHO everything is going in the right direction. The work being done on the init
system is a good example of that: it needs to be done (although I'm dreading the move
from our current init system to the new one). We've got a good hiearchy in place with
very open development standards and I believe that's very healthy. We've locked down
the feature creep and are sticking to our road map. In short, everything's finally
coming together, but it's taking a very long time. I just don't know how much longer
I'm willing to wait and live with such a picky system.

Well, thank you! What we sorely need in terms of development is the reliable regression test suite, which is as of now unheard of for bash developers ;-). We also need a nice GUI to be more productive, as is evidenced by recent introduction of Web-based grimoire browsing tools. We spend too much time pumping the spell versions up, although this process is know to be automatable to a large degree. Instead we could pay more attention to complex spells like OpenOffice and doing

That about sums it up. I still haven't decided yet what I'm going to do
next. Hopefully this email will lead to improvements in our distro. It
certainly won't be a complete waste: I've convinced myself to try a fresh
install before moving on to something else. :)

Yeah, I have a machine at work installed somewhere in the Winter or early Spring, it has no init system problems that my laptop has.

Keep up the good work guys! I believe in where you're headed, so no matter
what I do we may yet end up together down the road... only time will tell.

Nobody can motivate better than yourself :-). So give it a try. I can only say that we're determined to continue improving the distro, and all the feedback is very welcome. Here's a perk, I don't know if it'd work for you, but everyone who ever watches me work in the office, says that my computer is much faster, more responsive, and looks fine for a business desktop (I'm on GNOME 2), and mine one is definitely not better than one the others have. It's changing, I'm getting a new Athlon XP 2800 MHz-based system with 1 GB of RAM, but the old one is measly 700 MHz Pentium 3 with 256 MB, so I think it's a very good feedback from my colleagues, and extra justification of myself going extra mile with Linux as a kernel and with SourceMage as the distribution.
Cheers!

Sergey.





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