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  • From: Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>
  • To: Source Mage Discussion <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Happy New Year!
  • Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2015 11:56:01 +0300

Hello, fellow mages!

First of all, let me wish you and your families a Happy New Year!
I hope this year will bring all the best you could dream of.

And second, I have a small gift for our community.
But let me tell some short fairy tale before.

"Once upon a time little stealth located sourcemage.org through the
deepest forests of distrowatch.com and many Linux distros existed more
than ten years ago. Famous and powerful mage sandalle[0] opened a whole
new world of kind and wise developer community to him. Along with that,
the face and style of sourcemage.org inspired little stealth to try out
new Linux distro and stick with it for the rest of his life."

Yes, that was nice.

The last 2 years were hard and shocking (speaking of real life part)
for me. Several unforseen consequences have changed it a lot, but I hope
this 2015 year will be filled with smgl progress from my side as much
as possible.

During the last years someone has been carefully burying the unique
face of Source Mage. Without this face we're lost in a modern endless
web which is continuously happening. There's a way to find and recreate
a face for the distro. But I'll tell you what: changing one ruby engine
with another is not it. Especially with default or ugly theme and when
it stinks[1]. Even more: you must understand that *everything* needs
maintenance. It doesn't matter is it about your car, server, program or
any other instrument. Without maintenance the thing you cherish so hard
is dead.

I understood it years ago, but too bad I had no plenty of time to change
that in smgl from grimoire lead position.
So yelling about "unmaintainable drupal" doesn't sound good for me even
now. If you need some software alive, you should carefully update not
only it but also the server software it is running on, fixing security
and compatibility issues while keeping our webplace fresh and stable.
Slackness on this side costed us too much. Anyway it's better to leave
it as-is than change to something that noone will use.
We lost our original face.

I had a dream. A dream to resurrect it.
But you will never guess what inspired me to try. Yeah, it's systemd.

We're no longer strong as before, mainly because of no real developers.
Most of them have grown up and left the distro or even SA sphere. And I
can understand that, because real life is more important than your
virtual "hobby". I really miss afrayedknot[2], alley_cat[3], dmlb2000
[4], p3pilot[5] and many more as developers. Others just lost the faith
in Source Mage's future. We can't force both groups of them to
contribute because life is life. So the only way is to attract some new
fresh blood. But tell me one thing -- how? Without any good webface,
without ads on distro-related sources, without regular releases and so
on -- that's not gonna change. And imageboard discussions on IRC don't
really help here.

My main idea was -- to get back the face that inspired myself to try
smgl long ago. So let me present a try for the new Source Mage webface:

http://beta.sourcemage.guru

About styles:
- main style is a combination from original (2002) and drupal (2005)
versions of sourcemage.org
- additional styles/style-notes are just my imagination
- layout is based on 2002 version mostly (with several additions)

About information:
- resources that were used: my personal archives, our mailing lists,
our servers, our wiki, irc logs, official mails by Eric Schabell from
lwn.net, some others
- images were taken from our mirror servers
- the things were discarded (as of now) from the wiki: all changelogs
(their places are in scm), sorcery/cauldron/grimoire release notes,
meeting logs, international pages (it's better to put them on the
future resources like de.sourcemage.org, fr.sourcemage.org,
pl.sourcemage.org, etc.), personal pages -- future of these parts will
be solved later (currently -- kept in the archives)
- the things to migrate from current wiki/site: HowTos, the rest of
pages (around 350), news/blog archives (might take a long time for
complete history of the distro)
- lots of typos were fixed in currently posted pages
- many articles were combined to save number of pages; on the other
hand -- some were separated from each other for better understanding
and linking layout

About technologies:
- web: Hatta[6], Wok[7]
- templating: Jinja[8]
- server-side: Source Mage (installed from the latest chroot -
grimoire 0.61-20 + some additions from my personal grimoire), lighttpd
[9] + mod_fastcgi

Comments on the implementation:
- everything you see except news is Hatta
- news engine is Wok
- Hatta was chosen as one of the most flexible but yet lightweight
wiki-engines with ability to keep sources/history in scm repository
(mercurial[10] here, so it's possible to clone all the site) with
support of wiki creole 1.0 standard[11]
- Wok was chosen over others (i.e. Pelican[12], though it can be used as
well, both support Jinja) because of simplicity and it has less
dependencies while providing the same functionality for our needs
- the site looks well on all portable devices like mobiles or tablets
- the site conforms HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 3

There's a lot in our TODO list, like merging devel branches or
preparing new official ISOs, but the start is here -- we need more
developers interested in successful future of Source Mage.
I propose this version of the site for sourcemage.org as well as a
brand new approach for further development -- it would be nice to
invite people from several Linux resources to join our development
team, and here's a good place to invite them to. I also suggest
migration of our bug-tracking system either to github[13] (which was
discussed before) or to redmine[14].

[0] Eric Sandall
[1] https://www.chiliproject.org/
[2] Andrew Stitt
[3] Arwed von Merkatz
[4] David Brown
[5] George Sherwood
[6] http://hatta-wiki.org/
[7] http://wok.mythmon.com/
[8] http://jinja.pocoo.org/
[9] http://www.lighttpd.net/
[10] http://mercurial.selenic.com/
[11] http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Creole1.0
[12] http://blog.getpelican.com/
[13] https://github.com/
[14] http://www.redmine.org/

--
Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>

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