Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

Dear fellow mages,

I am inclined to say goodbye. I am fed up. I cannot do a `sorcery
rebuild` since sorcery goes into some endless loop trying and we're not
easily able to debug that. Now I just wanted to cast gcc. A whole lot
of other spells chimed in wanting to get updated, maybe leftover in the
queue from the rebuild attempt, whatever.

Among all the shortcomings and necessary improvements we'd like to have
in Sorcery since over 10 years, there is this one brutally retarded
stupid fucked up and dementend practice that tops all gripes for me:

1. Update spell with a library.
2. Old version of library is removed.
3. FUBAR BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS NECESSARY FOR THE TOOLCHAIN!

This happend yet again with one of the most obvious candidates:

[…]
gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libreadline.so.8.0 -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,-rpath,/lib 
-Wl,-soname,`basename libreadline.so.8.0 .0` -o libreadline.so.8.0 
readline.so vi_mode.so funmap.so keymaps.so parens.so search.so rltty.so 
complete.so bind.so isearch.so display.so signals.so util.so kill.so undo.so 
macro.so input.so callback.so terminal.so text.so nls.so misc.so history.so 
histexpand.so histfile.so histsearch.so shell.so mbutil.so tilde.so colors.so 
parse-colors.so xmalloc.so xfree.so compat.so -lcurses 
gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libhistory.so.8.0 -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,-rpath,/lib 
-Wl,-soname,`basename libhistory.so.8.0 .0` -o libhistory.so.8.0 history.so 
histexpand.so histfile.so histsearch.so shell.so mbutil.so xmalloc.so 
xfree.so -lcurses 
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/readline-8.0/shlib'
Protecting special libraries
Dispelling readline
Dispelled spell: readline
Compile log for readline 8.0 Completed Build on Wed Aug 19 12:56:14 UTC 2020
/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.7: cannot 
open shared object file: No such file or directory
(END)

Yes the END. This screwup should simply not be possible. And we know
this since ages. Last year I suggested to at least add readline to the
global protection list as a band-aid:

        https://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16112
.
I also discussed a per-spell solution with proof-of-concept on

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

and there's a sorcery git branch for it (devel-sobukus-protection).

This is no the full thing … it needs clean-up (envisioned via cleanse)
and actual integration into the grimoire … preferrably as a default
that avoids removal of old .so.X[.Y] files. There's enough in SMGL
that's well below state of the art (cast priviledge isolation, castfs
successor with atomic merges into filesystem … rollback, even). It
should at least not be actively retarted in hurting itself. There, I
said it again. Am I triggering someone?

But, well … the project is so dead that there isn't even enough energy
to discuss that stuff. Well … or there is some initial discussion that
prevents me from just committing something and thus stops any further
activity. Even if there's some activity left in SMGL for various little
personal goals, isn't that a bit ill-fated if the whole thing is
rotting from the ground up?

Also: What's the deal here, specificalluy? How come that someone
upgrades readline to soversion 8 and does _not_ experience instant
system breakage?! How does that even work? I got instant failure to run
bash and the installation was killed. Did you folks ditch castfs and
things now work better without it? Should we deprecate it as long as
we don't have a modern implementation? The 8 upgrade is over a year old
already … so you see how starved of updates this particular box is.
It's a wonder it works at all, but I guess I cannot further justify to
run such an outdated and broken system on a workplace.

So, is there someone left to convince me of the opposite? Do we have
some motivation to actually fix this crap? Or should we let SMGL rest
in peace, only for Treeve to continue to push spell updates to Nirvana?

I guess I'm getting old and start to question what I waste my lifetime
with. It could be a silly game, yes, but there needs to be some kind of
reward. What's in this Game of Spells?


Alrighty then,

Thomas