Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

Dear Source Mages,

apart from all the other clear signs of barely suspended animation of
the project, I want to draw attention again to one major hurdle for me
to consider updating/keeping my current SMGL installs: The ignorant
destruction of the system on doing certain upgrades that break things.

Most recent example: I got a box on stable grimpoire. As that is not
viable, I got some spells picked from test where a newer version really
is mandatory. I noticed that I really have to pick openssl 1.1, too, as
1.0 doesn't do it anymore. So I update openssl … and that triggers
recast of wget. But the old wget won't build with new openssl, I need
the version from test, too. So I pick that. But sorcery cannot download
the source anymore because wget is broken because of missing
libssl.so.1.0. Even if I had picked the new wget spell before casting
openssl, there is no guarantee that the download of wget will be
finished before the cast breaks installed wget.

This instanity has to stop! There are of course proper options like
delayed atomic filesystem merges, container casting, what not … but
there is the simple option not to delete vital libraries while they
still might be used.

We have proposed solutions to (parts of) the problem:

- https://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16112
- https://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16100

Some ancient discussions dealing with SMGL fragility:

- https://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13121
- https://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8295

I am not completely sure if just keeping the libfoo.so.$SOVERSION
without associated files/config/modules is always enough to keep things
working for the relevant cases, but it for sure seems to work for the
most serious breakage where a necessary tool won't even start (e.g.
wget may have broken actual HTTPS support at runtime, but it would
still work for plain HTTP downloads as long as the library can be
loaded).

The point I want to stress here: I don't see much point in continuing
to try to pretend that SMGL is a viable distro as long as there is no
progress on the problem that the patch bug 16100 should solve.

I might live with SMGL being more of a toolkit to ease installation of
a Linux-From-Scratch-like system, as it started out being exactly that
for me. I might be able to live with the pain I inflict on myself by
choosing to run that. But I am not willing to stand the package
management prematurely nuking files it needs for its own operation
again and again. It can be not very helpful. But it better not be
actively destructive.

I guess I'll have to make a personal branch of sorcery … or are we at
the stage where everyone who wants to contribute is free to change
things so that at least there is some progress? I'm tired of starting
discussions that effectively end all action as the discussion dies (or
never really begins).


Alrighty then(?),

Thomas