Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 05:01:45AM +0800, Thomas Blanchin wrote:
> Hello sourcemagers.
> 
> I had not used sourcemage since a long time because of some unsupported 
> hardware problem.
> I was happy to test the new ppc-iso with 2.6.9 and nptl support. THe iso 
> was pretty good, and I reported the few bugs I encountered to benoit.
> The thing that surprised me, is that the iso installs gcc-3.4.3 and 
> glibc_20041110, which arn't either in the stable and in the test grimoire.
> 
> Then, I told benoit about that, and he said me that the easyest way to have 
> nptl support on ppc, was to modify the gcc and glibc spells so that sorcery 
> installs other realeases than them provided by stable and test grimoire.
> Problem is that :
> the gcc and glibc spells provided by stable or test make a brand new 
> installed software to crash, because of some problem of those 2 versions on 
> ppc.

SourceMage without nptl and gcc 3.3 works just fine on my ppc laptop. 

I dont think a release iso should ever have software on it we dont have
in our own test/stable grimoires. But im guessing the iso you used was
a test iso, although I dont see why there cant be a ppc iso that uses
linuxthreads and gcc 3.3 with the 2.6.9 kernel (ive used 2.6.9 on my
ibook).

On the other hand seth's idea for a custom grimoire could work
as an interim solution so some of these porting type issues can get
worked out and the work others are doing is encoded somewhere accessable
(perforce) rather than somewhere difficult to access (an iso).

> 
> I have the feeling that so many people modify their grimoire in order to 
> correct buggs generated by stable, that nobody use stable grimoire, and 
> also become more and more deprecated.

Well, stable gets the updates from test after they are tested, but
apparently stable isnt updated enough, if we update too frequently though,
it just gets code that is not well tested, which would break it even
more. Can you cite some examples of where stable is depreciated/buggy
and test isnt? How could the process be improved? Also, the best way
i know of currently to have fixes get into stable more quickly is to
test them and let us know that they are tested so they can be put
into stable. Currently there isnt much feedback on grimoire fixes,
specifically, we dont use the verified functionality in bugzilla much,
so we're stuck with the "assume its stable after 2 weeks" process,
with more user feedback, and/or a way for that feedback to be provided,
maybe that process could be sped up without introducing more problems.


> 
> Do grimoire team realize that many people leave sorcery very quickly 
> because of such problems ?
> Unfortunatly, that's what I just did, because gcc-3.4.x and a higher 
> version of glibc is required in order to have a correct PPC system.

correct != supports nptl, I think they are really very different issues.
Although I dont think that my ppc installation is "incorrect" its been
working quite well :-) (considering Im typing on it)


> 
> I already add reported a bug the 2004-07-18, look at bug 7131. Has 
> something changed for the gcc spell in 7 months ?

yes, 3.4 is not in test/stable, and theres reasons it cant be put into
test just yet [0], along with that there was a lot of work in fixing up
spells to build with it over the past 7 months; a HUGE number of things
didnt build with it when it came out. Rather than inconveniencing almost
everyone (ppc included) by having the standard compiler be practically
useless, we held off and fixed the spells that didnt work with it. Believe
me, I bug arwed about 3.4 on almost a regular basis :-)

Since the glibc issues are hopefully finally worked out, that solves
some of the last pieces of the log-jam as I understand it.

Its hard to have it both ways, people want something stable, and want
something on the leading edge (ie: nptl on ppc)...

> 
> Maybe not enough people works on ppc to understand what I'm talking about, 
> but the repetitive problems makes me crazy enough.

I can sympathize with this, unfortunatly to most of the linux world,
ppc is a second class citizen, instead of "all the worlds a vax" its now
"all the worlds an ia32 linux box", my airport card probably wont ever
work in linux because the x86 support comes via ndiswrapper and broadcom
wont release specs to write a driver, which means, there arent many
people interested in writing a driver for it, which means ppc folks are
just out of luck (I ended up getting wireless around my home with
bluetooth instead).

> 
> Is the team motivated to show sourcemage to the world, or do they just want 
> their system to be working on their machine?

Well ideally both, but I can see what you mean. People do want sourcemage
to work on machines other than their own, which is why we havent made the
gcc 3.3 -> 3.4 upgrade yet since it for a long time has had un-resolved
problems. Arwed has been a one man army trying to get those things fixed
for everyone. Unfortunatly if the only iso you can use at the moment
uses unstable spells not in the main grimoires (and get wiped on updates)
we're kinda stuck, either a) we need the rest of the gcc 3.4 problems
fixed, or b) a ppc iso with the hardware fixes you need but without nptl.

-Andrew

[0] http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7923