Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>]

I agree.

Because "popularity" could put the distro in wrong hands, like what has
happened to Debian tech committee.

Ismael, I suggest you to read all Hall of Fame[0] pages. Those will try
to reveal the true cause of SMGL existence and its niche. It is also
good to inspect them to understand why people liked SMGL as-is and the
way it was designed with.

Personally, those pages have made my vision to SMGL's ideas much
stronger.

SMGL is like OpenBSD -- it is a filter. And yes, nowadays being popular
means nothing but money; and that applies to almost any sphere. It has
nothing to do with quality or morality as well.

[0] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/Developers/Hall%20of%20Fame

On Mon, 2 Feb 2015 18:39:23 +0100
Remko van der Vossen <wich AT yuugen.jp> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 10:01:44PM -0300, Ismael Luceno wrote:
> > 
> > We can become popular.
> 
> To be perfectly honest, I don't want SMGL to become popular.
> 
> Now, you might think I'm some kind of hipster that scoffs at anything
> valued by more than a fraction of the population but you'd be sorely
> amiss. What I want is something that does what I tell it to, nothing
> less, nothing more. SMGL is the closest thing I have been able to find
> for a reasonable amount of effort.
> 
> LFS does the same thing, but takes way too much effort to maintain, I
> ran a home server/router on LFS for nearly two years and while it indeed
> did exactly what I told it to, nothing more and nothing less, it took a
> horrendous amount of effort. Now, I'm not saying this was a waste, it
> was a valuable learning experience. I learned a lot about GNU Linux, I
> learned a lot about software packages, I learned a lot about getting
> efficient and I learned a lot about system adminning. As for the time,
> well, I was still a student, so who cares.
> 
> All the other distros always try to be smart, which I hate. Everybody
> always seems to think source based distros are about performance,
> "because you can optimize everything for your machine." Biggest load of
> crap I ever heard. Maybe there was a single grain of truth to this back
> when distros were built for generic i386, (as in still working on a 386
> without even an FPU,) but these days, and even for the last 10 to 15
> years it's crap. If you want to optimize for anything you optimize for
> usage, not for the machine. That is, you leave out all the crap that you
> don't need. But anyway, what source distros are really about, in my view
> at least, is as Jeremy already mentioned, the principle of least
> surprise. Whenever I am forced to use some brain dead Linux distro I
> always end up running into some kind of trouble because I want something
> slightly different from default and then have to spend hours, if not
> days or weeks trying to understand what the fsck is going on and which
> stupid feature is trying to be too smart for its own good ruining my day
> in the process.
> 
> On SMGL I don't have that problem. Yes of course stuff still breaks, it
> breaks way more than it should, but it's understandable that it does so
> given the amount of hours we can collectively put into it. However, when
> it does break, most of the time I can solve it easily by knowing the
> toolchain, knowing what is supposed to happen and just attacking the
> problem logically. This is why I am still running SMGL on a multitude of
> systems, why I am still hanging around in the SMGL community and why I
> will not give up on SMGL even though we've been in a downward spiral for
> way too long now. With other distros this wouldn't be possible, when you
> run into a problem there nine times out of ten the only recourse you
> have is to just wipe the system, reinstall and pray to the digital gods
> that this time it'll just magically work. If it doesn't you'll just have
> to choose between giving up and hoping that someone someday will fix it
> or giving up and jumping ship and try some other distro. Now, I don't
> know about you guys, but I'm not the giving up sorta guy which means
> I'll start digging and digging until I know way, way more about the
> details of some insane system thought up by a too clever for him/herself
> nitwit than I care for, driving my to the edge of the cliff of insanity
> myself. I've done it a couple of times in the past and have had enough
> of that, it gives me migraines and pisses me the fsck off, so I tend to
> not let myself get put into that position anymore. This is why I choose
> SMGL.
> 
> So, now, why wouldn't I want SMGL to become popular? Wouldn't it be
> marvellous if everybody thought the same way about these kinds of things
> and wouldn't create these stupid systems anymore? Why yes, yes that
> would be great, but the simple fact of the matter is that that will
> never ever happen. Joe public wants a lot of bang for their buck, even
> if they aren't paying for anything they still don't want to do anything.
> They want to have everything served to them on a silver platter. Of
> course this isn't possible to do for everyone; different strokes for
> different folks. People do not all want the same thing, some people want
> vi, some people want emacs, other people are wondering what the hell
> those guys are doing with a text editor. It's the same with everything,
> people want different stuff, but people don't want to put in any effort.
> So what are popular distros? They are distros that cater to the largest
> possible group of people that make do with a certain subset of features.
> Doing this allows them to make certain assumptions when they need to be
> clever so that everything can be handed to people on a silver platter.
> Though woe be unto they that dare veer from the yellow brick road.
> 
> SMGL should, and hopefully never will, fit this pattern. Yes, there is
> still a lot of work to be done, and there always will be, the world
> isn't sitting still, but that doesn't mean that we should just throw
> everything overboard and try to be popular, if we did that, then what
> are we still doing here? We'd be better off joining the teams of already
> popular distros. No, instead I see SMGL always being a niche distro,
> some more people than we have kicking around now, that's for sure, but
> we'll never be taking over the world.
> 
> So let's just try and be the best distro we can be and not the most
> popular distro we can be.
> 
> Thanks,
> Remko
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--
Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>

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