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  • From: Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] OFF-TOPIC bi-arch request WAS: ISO generation
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:29:25 -0800

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 12:56:10AM +0100, Laurent Wandrebeck wrote:
> > Just curious why do you keep bringing up bi-arch support at the drop of
> > a hat? I didnt even mention sorcery in that email...Its like everything
> > is seen with this lens that distorts whatever is being discussed to a
> > bi-arch discussion.
> Stop it right now. You seem to forget that sorcery is necessary to install
> a system with an iso. Several people asked for an iso that supports
> something else that pure x86. If sorcery aim is to be pure x86,
> that simply _sucks_.

You dont seem to understand that bi-arch is just one small piece of the
world, you dont need bi-arch to run amd64, you dont need it to run ppc,
you dont need it for sparc. You ONLY need bi-arch if you want to run a
very special blend of amd64, which as swoolley points out, can be done
in other ways.

> > Please try not to stray WAY off-topic in this discussion. This is a
> > discussion about iso generation.
> I am not off topic. sorcery is one really important point.
> >
> > I will stick with what I said in the meeting, which you didnt quite seem
> > to understand, but I'll repeat for repitition sake :) Maybe it will get
> > through this time? Lets see if it does.
> I have understood, but your decision is not the right one.
> About 10 people interested in other archs, and you dare to say "nah,
> we'll just support x86". Do you have any idea of the number of people
> that uses SMGL ? 10 people is quite a bunch !

We support ppc. Im just saying we arent doing bi-arch /right now/, for
the 10 people who "need" it, and for some reason cant use pure amd64
plus a 32bit chroot as swoolley suggests...

> >
> > bi-arch is a feature of both the iso and sorcery, if you take a look
> > at sorcery bugs theres quite a few other things to do already, if you
> bi-arch is mainly a sorcery question. OK, there are others things to do,
> but bi-arch is certainly not one of the features to consider as
> unimportant.

I didnt say it was unimportant, there are lots of things that are important,
im just saying its not important right now with respect to a lot of other
things that will gate hundreds of other people from using sourcemage.

> > look at the iso team, we dont even have a consensus on how we're going
> > to make isos or a reasonable installer, why would we try to spread our
> we don't have a consensus on the way to follow. Why ? because the
> leader didn't show any real path to follow. Now, as we need to progress,
> we can't allow us to simply wait.

Okay, this discussion is about moving forward, making progress with
some sort of iso generation scheme...im not sure what im holding up here
except for a fringe feature 10 people want.


> > (as you say) "already too small team" over another feature that only 10
> > people need? If and when the iso team is going to commit to having
> > bi-arch iso's and we have a consensus on iso generation (!) sorcery
> > will be there with bi-arch support. As it stands currently like i said,
> already too small team. that's perfectly right. Several sections are
> unmaintained, bug number is still too high to have something we can
> reasonnably call 1.0. And you want to kill a feature that would leave
> something like 10 people offroad ? 10 people is important, do not
> overestimate the people in and around SMGL.

So...you want to spend a lot of resources on a feature for 10 people
(most of whom arent on the dev team anymore) to keep them around, when
intead we could divert those resources where potentially hundreds of
people could benefit by way of a functional iso? Im not sure I follow
the logic here, sorry, maybe i missed something.

> > we dont even have the basics down yet, we have a very small iso team,
> > we have a very small sorcery team, why would we implement your fringe
> > feature over having an iso that the majority of the x86 world could use?
> basics are there.
i was refering to the iso

>we have a bi-arch iso in testing phase. i've even an
> installed system thanks to it. Moreover, it is _not_ my "fringe feature",
> i'm not the only one wanting to run a x86_64 system in native mode.

Who else posts long emails to iso threads asking for sorcery support
for this feature? looks pretty fringe to me...theres hundreds of people
who need x86 and ppc isos, and maybe any some who would benefit from
an amd64 iso who dont need bi-arch /right now/ and can survive with a
32bit chroot or reconsider why they are using a 64bit operating system.


> > 1) it wouldnt satisfy everyone, it would satisfy 10 people as you say
> > in case 3 in fact, having a consensus on iso generation would mean
> > better isos, which would satisfy quite a few more people than just 10.
> > It would bring new users, given the experiences of users who try out
> > 0.9.3 iso, im surprised we have /any/ new users.
> Did you see any other iso better than that ? i've installed it
> over a couple of boxes without any problem. And please, please,
> stop saying people that what they do is crap. We're already too few.
> Do you really want to maintain SMGL alone ?

I didnt say what people do is crap, im sorry if thats how i was
interpritted, its not what i intended. I think we've a lot of room
for improvement. Ive installed that iso, i have filed bugs on things i
noticed were wrong, but since im a developer i know how to fix things
that are wrong and to avoid mistakes. New users arent blessed with our
expertise. I have watched in horror on irc as people fight through those
same bugs I found. For every one of those people on irc, you know theres
got to be at least a few more who didnt have the initiative to come on
irc and ask for help.

> > 2) its already in a sub-branch in its partially implemented form, which
> > is actually less work for for "the already too small team" because we
> > dont have to fix bugs related to it, or support it when only 10 people
> > supposedly need it. However that doent mattter anyway because the
> > feature isnt even fully documented or designed because for the reasons I
> > ellaborated upon above, we're not ready with the basics of iso
> > generation, so we're not going to go for some obscure feature that only
> > 10 people want, when instead we could implement features that will
> > benefit everyone /right now/.
> It is not a partially implemented form, as we can have a complete system
> with it.
uhm, being able to have a complete system is different than it being
complete..of course maybe you got some secret stash of code that i didnt
because whats there sure doesnt look complete to me.

> the point is, we need to maintain a patched sorcery, and some patched
> spells.

with what developers? the ones that would be otherwise maintaining the
uni-arch stuff?

> Meaning, more work to get that ongoing, because main branch doesn't want
> to accept an already tested feature that works.
Its not complete, of course like i said, you probably have some secret
stash of patches i dont because the stuff i see in proj2 is not at all
ready for prime time.

> And, again, please stop
> considering 10 people is nothing. In rh, mdh, debian world ok, not here.

But...it is not much, and actually, all i really see are like 3 people
who care about this feature. I see 3 every few days who want bare plain
boring x86 support to work.

Please stop saying 10 people and bi-arch support is /everything/ it isnt,
im sorry.

> >
> > 3) im not refusing to do this feature, im refusing to do it until we
> > have a consensus on iso generation, a stream of reasonable uni-arch isos
> > (oh yea those!) and its a commited iso team project in the near future.
> A consensus ? well, do you really want 1.0 to come out this year ?
> We're late, for sure, in year 2002 we were already discussing on 1.0 !
> (for 2002, of course)
> Waiting for a consensus, well if members don't try to progress, I'm afraid
> we won't have another iso until, well, quite a long time.

Yea, and if we divert all our resources to this bi-arch thing you want, we'll
never get done! this seems like a contradiction, you want 1.0 to come out
this year, but you want us to divert a bunch of resources we dont have to a
feature you and 9 other supposed people want.

> >
> > Ive said before and again, that when the iso team is actually functional
> > and capable of addressing more advanced projects sorcery will be there
> > to greet it, but right now theres a lot of other work to be done first.
> ISO team is a mess. why ? no real leadership. one wants an iso spell.
> another one wants new features. one reworking existing scripts. another
> one
> working on splitting scripts. and another one working on improving this
> and that.
> Features being refused, new things that simply don't work etc.
> ISO team is forking on its own ! Too few people, working on different
> things,
> instead of working on things that have proven to work, even if they're not
> perfect. Did you say that 10 people were meaningless ?

You're comparing apples and oranges...but anyways, how many users become
developers? certainly not every one, probably more than 1 out of 100,
lets say, 1 out 10. So if we waste all our time for your 10 mystery
users, 1 of them will be a developer. Now lets say we waste all our time
on getting better support for single arch systems, lets say we get a
100 new users, wow, that means 10 new developers who can help out with
bi-arch. This is a numbers game, basic economics, we get more "revenue"
from our basic uni-arch support than from bi-arch support, we can then
use that gained "revenue" to fulfill other requests (like maintaining
sections, so other people can do this stuff).

> >
> > I dont really have time to repeat this anymore, so please think
> > carefully about bringing up bi-arch support and re-hashing the same
> > questions. Im not saying we cant ever talk about this feature, its just
> > I am going to have the same answer for you until the things ive said
> > change.
> Rehashing the same question is important, esapecially when decisions
> taken are not the right ones. Taking volunteering people off, is not only
> losing users.

You think the decision is not the right one, but 3 other people responded
in agreement with my decision. You may think its the wrong decision,
but i cant make everyone happy, so someone is always going to think the
decision i made was the wrong one; although usually they dont make so
much noise from rooftops about it in discussions that have nothing to
do with their precious feature. Show us the numbers and we can ammend
the roadmap to include this functionality. I dont see the numbers in your
comparison since you're ignoring the single arch crowd which i think is
substantially bigger than you're giving it credit for.

> As it is late here, i will reply in the same mail for several people:
> to Karsten: "Time is not to worry about new features". But that's the
> reason
> new versions of sorcery and smgl 1.0 are postponed. And you want to
> neglect already tested features that will satisfy a bunch of devs and
> users ?
> Concerning ISO, and getting from a one-man dev to a decentralized model,
> when benoit was creating isos (or myself), in 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 days, there
> was a small team, but we were working hand in hand. So decentralized
> was functionnal.
So you say, the rest of us saw a year of zero progress and 1.0 that was
going to have a re-rolled iso from the starting days, and nothing to
build on if those people disappeared.

> Now it doesn't because some think that existing things
> aren't good enough, even if these things have created more than 10 isos.
> Everyone's working in his corner, winning for approval, waiting for lead.
> Where will we land, or at least most of us ? in a trash. that's
> ridiculous.
> What a waste of time :( About buggy installer, i must have tried,
> installed
> something like a hundred isos. Buggy installer, as you said, is not so
> buggy. OK, it hits a couple users, (a FB joke prolly) but that really far
> from
> a majority. Every program has bugs, and installer don't have really
> serious
> ones.
There was quite a lot of noise our last major iso made and lot of people
turned away from it because of the problems with it. I would have to
argue that its not good enough, check out the forums sometime.

> To Seth: Bi-Arch isn't important ? we have something like 30 people
> in and around smgl (devs, bug reporters, testers). And you want to get
> rid of 10 !? Pure 64 bits ? quite a bunch of programs simply won't run
> or compile in a pure 64 bits environment.

Are 10 of our 30 /developers/ going to quit because we dont have bi-arch
support? I dont think that many of our developers have 64bit machines...
Maybe Im wrong, I donno, my intincts tell me quite a few more people
would be jumping into this conversation if their were. But it really
only looks like you.

> Can you tell your users, your
> boss, or yourself, I won't use that proggy anymore ? I can't.
> "hmmm sorry guy, you'll have to forget that one, doesn't work with your
> new system. evolution is great don't you think ?"
chroot

> About having a good new
> basic ISO ongoing, are the previous ones not good enough ?
Nope -> bugzilla

> Did
> anyone give kiss-the-ass new isos ? No.
> Perforce, a nice tool. Well could be. Doesn't support symlinks, history
> seems to be lost when files are moved (i'm far from a p4 expert so i hope
> i don't say
> any mistake). We can't merge that feat, oops, sorry, that's simply people
> that don't
> want an interesting tested feature. Having three iso codebase is simply
> crazyness
> in smgl situation.
What do you think this discussion was about? merging those two codebases

> losing time, making 1.0 an illusionnary goal, being
> postponed,
> and postponed, and... You say you weren't able to contribute to ISO, but
> as far as
> i can remember, i was the one who commited scripts into p4. I've _never_
> rejected
> someone who tried to help. Even if i'm a crappy leader (and I know it).
> Your install
> guide was integrated for example. You're also talking about leaving
> skunkwork dev
> style, letting people help. Why the hell is devel grimoire still not
> available to people
> other than devs ?

Thats a pretty random point to bring up, lets remember irc when everyone
was using devel and NOTHING working right because lots of untested work
in progress changes were made there. It wasnt pretty. Incidentally you
can get devel if you ask one of the folks who mirrors it and have a good
reason and agree not to file useless bugs about work in progress code,
or you could look at the p4 web view of the repository.

> Aren't free/gpl/ open source software supposed to let
> anyone see
> and contribute to stuff ?
Yes, and 95% of the time the test is == to devel, and for those few
differences you can see it in p4 web. People can contribute patches,
i dont know where this idea came from that you cant. But also look at
other open source projects like the linux kernel. They throw out most
of their patches (yet you dont hear about discussions like this).

> There is _no_ french sector.
I think you missed the joke here.

> BearPerson, erics,
> sandalle,
> alley_cat, hamish, and loads of others were/are part of the team. isos
> were created
> by several people, adam, hamish, benoit, karsten, myself...you're talking
> as if there
> were some kind of lock on iso. that's wrong. You're talking about a single
> arch iso,
> but, ppc isos are already existing, x86_64 is coming, and you want to
> simply forget them,
> so x86 can be more stable, and then give more work to get (again) pcc and
> x86_64 ?

I dont think thats what he was saying at all

> To David: No, we are not close to 1.0, it has been postponed for at least
> a month.
> But I'll bet on at least 4 given the current situation. Quite big features
> are to be
> implemented in sorcery (correct resurrect etc) so why not bi-arch ? Don't
> you want
> To attract new users ?

correct resurrect is needed by everyone, bi-arch is needed by a small
percentage of users. If we keep adding features we'll never have 1.0,
and then we'll never get more users/developers so we can support your
feature. You really need to do a more careful inspection of the smgl
valley and potential users in general.

>
> So, at last, to conclude (1:00am here, need to go to bed).
> Sorry for being rough, and maybe rude. I just want smgl to keep improving,
> so,
> things are better when they are said. I don't want to spit on anyone. If
> ones can't bear
> my opinions, then so be it. I don't want to give orders to anyone. But
> take smgl history,
> the "other" fork (lunar, not to name it), has got 1.0 out months ago.

Their 1.0 was hardly what our 1.0 is going to be in terms of features
and functionality. They aren't equivalent things to compare with. What
we hope to do with 1.0 is have something high quality that will get us
more users so we can implement bi-arch and all that other stuff.
The best way we can get there is to not quarel over why "my feature
wasnt included and yours was!".

> We
> are still
> fearing to recompile glibc, aliens... Let's be brave. We have not been
> good (myself
> included) as managers to get smgl right. D'ont you think it is time to
> lose pride,
> recognize our errors, forget our pitifull quarrels between french, and
> whatever,
> take _decisions_ (without letting letting the third off the team
> off-side;) so we can
> really progress and try to respect at last a realistic roadmap ?

the bi-arch crowd isnt a third of the team so far as i know. And we are
trying to manage smgl better by having things on our roadmap that will
improve the quality of smgl for the greatest number of people.

> (please forget
> i think that, we should, it would be better to etc).
> Bah, I was pretty upset tonight. I hope that will lead to something better
> (forget flames, i will ignore, but if your comments are too insulting).
> PS: sorry for the typos (there must have some).
> PS2: i hope i've been clear enough, english isn't my mother language.

It not that I dont want progress in smgl, its just that we've chosen a
different optimization strategy than you. Im not saying 10 people isnt
important, but those 10 people arent all developers (i can only
think of one current developer who has an amd64), so really we have
10 users one who is a developer. Id rather have 100 more users and
10 developers.

Again, i'll say one more time that im not refusing to have bi-arch
support, im just not going to put it on the roadmap /right now/ for
reasons ive illustrated above. I understand it can be frustrating but
I think you should pause, take a deep breath, then step back and look
at the bigger picture. Life will go on for you, sorcery has been anything
but stagnant in my 9 months as lead, every one of those features thats
gone in has been waiting on the feature queue for at least as long as
bi-arch has been. You are not alone in wanting something in sorcery,
but, since we're short on resources everywhere in this project, we're
doing things that will bring the greatest number of users...

-Andrew

--
__________________________________________________________________________
|Andrew D. Stitt | astitt at sourcemage.org |
|irc: afrayedknot | afrayedknot at t.armory.com |
|aim: thefrayedknot or iteratorplusplus | acedit at armory.com |
|Sorcery Team Lead | ftp://t.armory.com/ |
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