Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Kevin Monceaux <Kevin AT RawFedDogs.net>]

SourceMage,

On Wed, Oct 07, 2015 at 06:43:01AM -0300, Ismael Luceno wrote:
 
> I didn't mean to say "for everyone", but right now SM is not appealing
> even for those that might like our philosophy, merely for technical
> reasons.

I thought I'd chime in in case input from a former user might be helpful.
It's been several years since I ran SourceMage on my desktop PC.  I like
SMGL's philosophy.  Some of the reasons I moved on to other distros:

    * Stable was never stable.  Every time a stable grimoire came out I
      always had to test it under a chroot first to see what broke before
      updating my main desktop PC.

    * Wanting to deviate from SMGL's philosophy even a little can be
      painful.  A mlocate spell I tried to create comes to mind.  I just
      read through a discussion on it from back in 2008 to refresh my
      memory.  It would have needed to replace three files, and perhaps a
      man page or two, from findutils.  I even tried filing a feature
      request with findutils upstream to add a configuration option to build
      findutils without installing those files.  Their reply was, "Just
      replace those files if you need to.  That's what other distros do."

    * Cleanse breaking things.  I can't remember the details but I find a
      few posts in the mailing list archives from me mentioning battling
      cleanse.  One posts mentions a problem I had with Firefox, xulrunner,
      and flash.  From that message it looks like I got some help on IRC and
      got them working, then cleanse went behind me and tried to "fix"
      Firefox which broke xulrunner again.  Granted, whatever I did to fix
      xulrunner probably gave cleanse good reason to think Firefox needed 
      cleansing.

    * Sorcery's speed, which I think has improved since I last ran SMGL, and
      choice of development language.  In the past I did a little hacking on
      gaze to add a couple of features I wanted, but found it somewhat
      painful with bash.  For formatting some of the output I resorted
      piping the output through a perl script.

    * Low number of spells available in the grimoires.  Many other distros
      do have an edge in this area.  On the other hand creating new spells
      for things that weren't already in the grimoires was kind of fun.

    * Playing 20,000 questions, especially with the initial rebuild.  More
      on this below.

    * All the website downgrades.  When I first started using SMGL the
      website at least looked like it belonged to SMGL.  If the current
      website had been in place back then I probably would never have tried
      SMGL.  I hope the site at Beta.SourceMage.ru gets moved into
      production within my lifetime.  I've said to myself several times in
      the past, "If they ever fix the website I might give SMGL another
      try."  In this day and age it's hard to take a distro seriously when
      they don't appear to care about their web presence.  I think the web
      site appearance is far more important than where the git repositories
      are hosted.

> Well, my idea was to decouple the configuration stage, and simply have
> upstream defaults used when unconfigured. Later we can have a tool to
> help the user find yet unconfigured spells/options to fine-tune the
> system.

If there were three things I could change about SMGL after stable being
stable and the website, the way configuration options are handled would be
the third.  It's a pain answering a couple of dozen questions then realizing
one of the questions should have been answered differently.  While I would
prefer a different approach, I'm not sure what approach would be better.
Something like FreeBSD's configuration dialogs might be nice.  Also, is
there any way to go back and easily change optional dependencies in the
future?  I know most SMGL users cringe at the thought of Gentoo use flags.
Gentoo is what I'm running on my desktop PC at the moment, and use flags do
have some nice features.  For example, if I'd installed several packages
without SSL support and decide I want to add SSL I can turn on the global
ssl use flag and then a single command would rebuild any packages that that
use flag change affects.  Is there any way to do something similar with
sorcery?



-- 

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.Lassie.xyz
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

What's the definition of a legacy system? One that works!
Errare humanum est, ignoscere caninum.