Public SourceMage Discussion List

[ron <macroron AT gmail.com>]

Robert, 

I will look in to the the sorcery api and documentation. 
(I hope someone here has an online link at hand).

I have installed a base system, managed to write a basic firewall, and started to be comfortable casting spells. 

I got stuck in casting xorg in order to cast a basic tiling window manager and gave up. 
I was too shy to ask on

I now live with with kde 4 on fedora 10 as my personal desktop system. 

I also have kde 4 installed on Arch Linux. 

My favorite distro so far.

I agree with most of your answers to my questions. 

I guess I needed a human and intelligent person to respond to my concerns.

I plan in the new year to study the api documentation and start learning shell scripting.

As soon as I am comfortable, expect to see me on irc and sm-discuss, now that I have made contact.

Right now I am busy trying to convert my meager savings to gold. :)

Thank You again,

Ron

-
Linux 
f8 
2.6.25.14-69.fc8 
#1 SMP Mon Aug 4 14:20:24 EDT 2008 
i686 
athlon 
i386 
GNU/Linux
--

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 9:04 AM, Robert Figura <rfigura AT aubergine.zwischengesicht.de> wrote:

ron <macroron AT gmail.com> schrieb:

> I wanted to avoid the work of learning bash, to understand the way your
> system scripts work together.

Look into it and you will see that the code is well written and even
appropriately documented: Just cast bashdoc and look for the sorcery api
documentation. (I hope someone here has an online link at hand)

> I was asking why great distros like Source Mage and Gentoo do not make it
> easier for novices to install, use, and learn about the underlying system
> and development environment.

It *is* easy if you're a programmer or an experienced admin. I guess
when you say "easy" you refer to having a graphical user interfaces.

To my opinion this is illusory because the GUI's we have seen are only
meant to do easy tasks. It's like trying to play a piano using a single
finger (the mouse) or sing an opera only by grunting. If you want to do
more complicated things you will need to use ten fingers (a keyboard)
or you may need to put lyrics into the song.

I am less of a scientific person and more a programmer and to me reading
source is often preferrable to reading manuals. This is why: In the
open source world, to have a program requires a programmer at first. To
have a manual requires a ready product (a program) to explain. But
programs continue to be developed and writing documentation is only fun
as long as you don't readily understand what you need...

So in practice we often have oversimplified or outdated instructions
and i see only one option: Read the source! This will only be as hard
as the programmer made it. Translating badly written code to one's
favorite language doesn't help very much (IMHO).

But if you would like to contribute instructions to sourcemage, by all
means do so! I'm sure: The crowd will love you for it and the devs will
happily provide all the info you need. To get started all you need is
to make yourself an account for the wiki.

> Making something easy to use and learn about does not seem to me to be to
> much to ask.

If you are not so much concerned about the details (maybe to build
something new upon sorcery) but about using the system there is a
fabulous online support on the irc network called #sourcemage. Since
this distribution has a comparatively small community this seems to be a
very appropriate way to respond to the afforementioned problem of less
than optimal documentation (IMO).

> The language of instruction man and machine in this case is bash.
>
> Why not use an easy to learn, modern, object oriented, scripting language.

Because bash (or rather sh) is *the* standard for communicating
administrative commands to a modern computer system. Remember we're
talking about multi purpose systems and not just an electronic
typewriter.

> Why do we have to always have to start from scratch?

This is going to be philosophical but if you would be a programmer you
could compare very old systems to programs which have been rewritten
very often. Most programmers i talked to see the advantage of doing
things from scratch. The gain of having written a prior version (try
spelling that as prototype) is the experience for the developer and to
find a new perspective or a better approach.

> Aren't there any software translators, man or software to translate from
> bash to a higher level, easier to understand scripting language.

No. There are tools to dive into existing systems. From boosted editors
to search tools to diagram generators for class hierarchy to debuggers
and run-time tracers and even more advanced refactoring tools.

> I hope I have made myself understood a little bit clearer.

At first i only grasped "Hey let's rewrite sorcery in <insert favorite
language here>" and i wasn't sure wether this was meant to be a joke or
a trolling or speculation without background. I have to apologize to
you if you were in fact asking for help to install / understand
sourcemage or learn programming.

Regards
 - Robert Figura

P.S.: I'd also like to take back my rant about your signature because i
     now think it must have been sent accidentally.

--
/* mandlsig.c 0.42 (c) by Robert Figura */
I=1702;float O,o,i;main(l){for(;I--;putchar("oO .,\nt>neo.ckgel-t\
agidif@<ra urig FrtbeRo"[I%74?I>837&874>I?I^833:l%5:5]))for(O=o=l=
0;O*O+o*o<(16^l++);o=2*O*o+I/74/11.-1,O=i)i=O*O-o*o+I%74*.04-2.2;}