Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Jan 12, Stephan Erb [steve-e AT h3c.de] wrote:
> 1) stable, stable-rc, testing and whatever
> Why should I use your stable-tree? It's outdated

Because it is stable, and some people care about that.

> and I cannot be sure
> whether all security fixes make it into the grimoire. (You don't fix old
>  software like the debian-sec-team does).

We do apply security fixes to stable, though it's fair enough that we don't
have people paying enough attention to this.  We have very limited
resources and people focus on what they can spend time on.  This is not an
excuse, just a fact.

> Therefore it would be a real
> risk to run it an a productive machine and stupidity to run it on a
> desktop system. And whoever needs it for a PC with no connection to the
> Internet would profit much more if you can offer him working
> "testing-snapshots" regularly.
> 
> Just looking at my MailBox I can see that even you, the developers,
> don't care about stable. (408 commits to master grimoire vs 93 to
> stable(-rc)).

If stable is stable it should not be changing very much, this is kind of
the point.

> I propose you to drop it! OpenSource works much better if you do it for
> you, not for a possible but almost non-existing user.
> If you want you can switch back to this development model if you have
> more resources, but currently it doesn't work well.

If you don't want to use it, don't use it; it doesn't hurt you for us to
offer it for those that do use it.  I personally would not run our test
grimoire on a production system, all of my production systems use stable.
Locals admins can manage these issues themselves, that's also a big part of
who we are vs. other distros.

> 3) prompt-delay
> There are questions that should never be skipped due to this delay. Lets
> assume I cast several spells. I would not have a look at the
> install/compile log, if everything works fine. Therefore I reduce the
> delay not to waste time.
> But very often I miss the important configure questions due to the slow
> update (see above)

The only way I can parse this is that you're running something like sorcery
upgrade and think you have to do it this way.  If downloading the grimoire
takes too long for you to wait to answer cast queries for spells that want
to update, run things in individual steps:

scribe update
sorcery queue
cast --queue

Most of my production boxes do the first two on a cron schedule and mail
me the results so I can come cast what I want to when I need to.

> or because I don't like to sit here for three hours
> to wait for a possible need to interact running cleanse.

If you think we need a way for queries to be flagged as "important" so
admins can set two different query timeouts, you're certainly welcome to
write a patch... from the rest of your mail I gather you get that's how
these things work.  If you have an itch, please scratch it and see if other
people find it useful.

> 4) creating own packages
> It is so easy to create own spells but so frustrating to get them into
> the grimoire. I stopped offering my own spells because I once did and
> there was so little reaction. Why should I bother you.

Most people don't find it this way so I apologize if you got a bad
experience.  Typically anyone who submits a few spells or decent patches to
bugzilla gets offered commit access, but again we have very limited
resources and sometimes people get missed.

> 5) reporting bugs
> Bugs can occur everywhere. Nobody should be blamed. But it would be nice
> if you could offer a better bug-reporting-system.
> Bugzilla looks so old and doesn't invite to work with. In addition all
> these different options are confusing and cannot be answered intuitively
> (I prefer the trac-ticketsystem, it is also easier to review how it is
> fixed)
> 
> 6) website and doc
> I think you know...
> 
> 7) ledger
> "Source Mage Ledger is a client/server based system that collects and
> processes
> stats about Source Mage GNU/Linux (users, spells, ...).
> Don't hesitate to cast smgl-ledger and upload your stats"
> 
> Sounds much like a privacy issue. I do not want anybody to know what
> software I use and whatever this tool does or might do.

Source Mage sucks because we offer an optional way for people to give us
automated feedback on which spells they use so we can know where best to
focus our time?  I cannot parse that.  Don't use it if you don't want to
and if you want to know that it does what it says it does, read the source.

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