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  • From: Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik <ruskie AT codemages.net>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire lead speech
  • Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:42:02 +0100 (CET)

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As I'm not good at long cohesive things I'll try to keep it short...

These are just a few observations that I have with regards to the distro
as a whole.

We're stagnating. Pure and simple. We're not picking up new developers.
We're losing old ones. And we put most of our effort if not all into
spell updates. This needs to change.

What I propose is:
split the grimoire into a core one that has basesystem(what is needed to
successfully run a system with networking)(and is versioned) AND any spells
that developers are willing to maintain. What I mean by maintain?

a) on updates - check for new dependencies and optional dependencies and
any new configure options(if a spell already has some)
b) on updates - cast test it AND run test it - also put the effort to
check with upstream mailing lists if any breakages are reported
c) receive bugmail for those spells - if you maintain it you should get
any bug reports

The reason for the split? Simple - to few active developers to cover all
the spells. So reduce it to the most important ones(things that
developers use on a daily basis and the core system) and increase their
quality(by doing better updates and more testing). If we can automate
the testing someway so much the better.

We also need to change the updates themselves. A user should not be
required to do a system-update to update a system. A cast spell should
pull in any required spells and update them if the spell requires a
newer version.

Any spells that do not have an official maintainer go into a contrib
grimoire or can be run from personal user grimoires. I would like to
increase the use of guru ran grimoires.

Some wishlist items(and if this were to require a new build api so be
it):
Versioned dependencies - we need sorcery support for this. What we need
is formal support in sorcery to support versioned
spells and dependencies. This is a wishlist item
but it would be nice to reduce the number of
broken spells due to version mismatches.

Multiversion spells - this was a bad idea and we should get rid of it
or formalize it into sorcery. Else it's an
unnecessary increase of complexity of spells
with no actual benefit and a lot of nasty side
effects - you never know what version a spell will
be when depending on it. With formalized
versioning and multiversioning this could actually
be of benefit.

A few personal words to all...

I love this distro and it saddens me each day that we aren't actually
improving but slipping. Most of you have seen me rant about broken
updates and such on IRC. I don't to this because I hate the work. But
because I'd like to see it improve. But I guess that's just me. I
generally have the mentality of channeling all the negative into energy
and putting it to better use. This is also the reason I accepted the
nomination. I've got so much bad energy from source mage(from spell
updates that when I do cast spell -> break: missing libA v### and
similar) that I want to channel it to improve it.

Regards

- --
Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik
Source Mage GNU/Linux Games/Xorg grimoire guru
Re-Alpine Coordinator http://sourceforge.net/projects/re-alpine/
Geek/Hacker/Tinker

Knowledge is important, knowledge you know is priceless. Share the knowledge,
build a better future for everyone.
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