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  • From: Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik <ruskie AT codemages.net>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Going back to Gentoo
  • Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:08:59 +0100 (CET)

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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.

Key id = F4C1F89C
Key fingerprint = 6FF2 8F20 4C9D DB36 B5B6 F134 884D 72CC F4C1 F89C

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