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  • From: "Wyatt Draggoo" <wyatt AT draggoo.com>
  • To: sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Sorcery]1.0: Is Source Mage Ready?
  • Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 17:29:23 -0800 (PST)

Hey folks,

First, I must apologize for my prolonged absence. Real life has gotten in
the way of a great deal I have wanted to be a part of, including SMGL.
Cauldron still sits first on the list of things to finish when I have time,
but as of now I'm not sure when that will be.

On to thoughts of the release. I have installed SMGL from nearly every one
of Adam's ISOs, and am currently using Beta 1. Barring learning curves
issues such as permissions in /dev and such, the initial SMGL install has
worked very cleanly. And then everything falls apart.

Currently, my issues include nothing working with the current ncurses---I
can't configure my linux kernel, for instance, and dialog can't find the
curses headers. XFree86 won't compile, along with Linux-PAM, vim, nethack,
libwww (wwwlib? The w3c one---I always forget), postfix and about three
quarters of the other spells I've tried. My biggest problem, though, is
that issues such as these have come up with *every* SMGL install I've done
in the three months since I screwed up the install I'd been using since
before we took over.

Now, granted, SMGL is not a distro geared towards user (or even, at times,
admin) friendliness, and I've been using the devel grimoire and sorcery,
but to not have anything work together even remotely right after an install
is shooting ourselves in the foot, and will certainly not help us out for
either reviews or new users. I can also see that bugs happen, and
occasionally there are updated spells that will cause a lot of grief
(*cough* db *cough* :), but those things should *only* be occasionally.

Besides a ton of testing for issues such as these, the other thing I
believe we need before we release 1.0 is a good, updated, accessable
post-install doc. Not something on the web, or buried in a man page or in
/usr/share/docs somewhere, either. Something that gets less'd the first
time a user logs in as root. We should be able to assume familiarity with
Unix-like commands, but not necessarily Linux:

SAMPLE DOC
Comgratulations on your install of SMGL! There are several things that
still need to be done to finish your system load. If you are not familiar
with these steps, the easiest way to run is to switch between this and a
second terminal (with <ctrl>-<alt>-1 and <ctrl>-<alt>-2) and do these steps
in order:

1) Change the root passwd.
2) Run sorcery update
3) Run sorcery system-update
4) Run sorcery rebuild
5) Cast useful-profile
6) ...
END SAMPLE DOC

Something along these lines (much more fleshed out and such, but you get
the general idea) would go a *long* way to helping people get a useful
system up. The LinuxCare Bootable Business Card has something like this at
startup. If you don't need it, just quit out of less. If you're not sure
what you're doing, though, it's indispensible.

Anyway, these have been my thoughts in my endless fight for a usable SMGL
system.

Wyatt

--
Wyatt Draggoo




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