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  • From: Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>
  • To: Kevin AT RawFedDogs.net
  • Cc: Source Mage Users Mailing List <SM-Users AT Lists.Ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Users] Possibly A New User - Introduction
  • Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:49:26 -0700

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Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> Fellow Source Mage Enthusiasts,
>
> I might be joining the Source Mage community of users. I've been a Linux
> user for several years and just discovered the Source Mage distribution last
> night.

We're always happy to see a new face. :) Be sure to join us in IRC as
well (irc.freenode.net channel #sourcemage) if you'd care to chat live
with fellow users and our intrepid developers.

> First, a little bit of my Linux history. I started out with Slackware in
> the 1.x kernel days on a 486 with a 100Mb hard drive. Due mainly to my lack
> of experience my Slackware box eventually became quite unstable. I'm sure I
> upgraded some packages without also upgrading the libraries the packages
> were dependent on. Slackware's package management system does no dependency
> checking. At some point I gave Mandrake a try. Recently I switched my main
> box from Mandrake to Gentoo. I'd been trying out Gentoo on a test box for a
> while before that. I've also attempted a couple of Linux From Scratch
> builds. For the most part I like Gentoo but there are a few things about it
> I don't care for. Recently I was considering giving Slackware another try.
> Actually, it was a post about ROCK Linux on a Slackware message board that
> lead me to discovering Source Mage Linux.

Various developers have a winding road as well to SMGL. ;) You can read
their stories from http://www.sourcemage.org/developers (look for the
"Developers Page" link).

> Anyway, being a D&D/Charmed/Buffy fan there are several things I like about
> the Source Mage package management theme. I downloaded the Source Mage
> install CD last night and gave it a try. My test box is an old Pentium MMX
> 200mhz PC with a flaky CD-ROM drive. After several tries and it failing to
> boot the install CD I switched to using qemu to test Source Mage. Last I
> checked it was still working on the "sorcery rebuild". After installing and
> getting the "sorcery rebuild" started under qemu I finally got my test PC to
> boot the Source Mage install CD and made it through the install on it. I
> didn't have time to go through all the questions "sorcery rebuild" would ask
> so I haven't started that process on my test PC yet. I did find one snag on
> my test PC that I didn't have under qemu. After the install finished and I
> booted Source Mage from the hard drive of my test PC I couldn't view man
> pages. When I tried "man sorcery", which worked right after the reboot
> under qemu, groff complained about a missing libstdc++ library. I suspect
> the "sorcery rebuild" will fix the missing dependencies. I'll get that
> started tonight after I get home from work.

Before doing the rebuild please file a bug with as much information as
you can think relevant so we can try to fix the problem.

> Although I've only tinkered briefly with Source Mage there are a few things
> I've been pleasantly supprised with.

We aim to please!

> Is running "sorcery update" followed by "scribe update" the equivelant of
> "emerge --sync" on Gentoo? Gentoo's "emerge --sync" takes an overabundant
> amount of time, especially the part of the process where it updates the
> portage cache. Updating Source Mage is extremely fast in comparison.

`emerge --sync` updates the package information on Gentoo, which is what
`scribe update` does in SMGL. emerge also, by default, uses rsync, which
is very slow over fast lines (rsync is better on slow lines, go figure
;)). We do a direct compressed tarball download, with some support for
rsync (though recent server updates broke this) and planned support for
other methods (such as checkout out a git repository of our packages).

If you want to do an equivalent of `emerge --sync && emerge -u world`
you can simply run `sorcery system-update` (or `sorcery -s` for short),
which runs the following commands:
scribe update (updates our grimoire, the list of packages).
sorcery update (updates Sorcery, our package manager).
cleanse (cleanse up stale package information)
sorcery queue (builds up a list of packages that have been updated).
cast --queue (begins compilation and installation of packages in the
queue).

> It appears that writing a spell for Source Mage is much simpler than
> creating an ebuild for Gentoo. It would be tuff to find a distribution that
> had all the packages one wants. Gentoo, for example, doesn't have a package
> for an xBase compiler, clip(http://www.itk.ru/english/index.shtml), that I
> use. After reading up on creating ebuilds I decided that the best approach
> would be to enter a bug in Gentoo's bug system requesting that someone with
> more ebuild experience create an ebuild for clip. I entered that request
> about a year ago. It hasn't been touched yet. Source Mage doesn't have a
> spell for clip either but I think I might stand a chance at writing one
> myself.

Spells, IMO (and I am quite biased ;)) are very easy to make. I have
contributed over 200 myself. :) We have documentation
(http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Spell_Writing_Handbook,
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/SpellwritingForDummies, and others on our
wiki) as well as a tool quill (in the guru-tools package) that can write
simple spells for you!

> One other build from source distribution that I'm considering, ROCK Linux,
> appears to make things even easier. With ROCK Linux creating a package from
> source is as simple as:
>
> Go through the usual build steps such as:
> ./configure
> make
> etc.
>
> Up to the point where one would run make install. At that point enter:
>
> mkpkg <PackageName> make install
>
> and the software in question is installed under ROCK Linux's package
> management system. If it wasn't for the attraction of the sorcery theme of
> Source Mage I would probably have taken ROCK Linux for a test drive last
> night instead.

That's a nifty feature, though from a quick glance it appears to make a
binary package that you can install (it monitors what files are
installed and puts those in the package), but doesn't make a package to
build from source. The above only works for packages supporting
./configure and friends. ;) A neat idea for binary distributions
(provided I am not misunderstanding its use, of course).

With quill, if the package is as simple to setup as the one in your ROCK
example you just need to provide a website URL and tarball URL and
quill will fill in the rest (I believe it has, or is in the works,
functionality to grab information from Freshmeat and such websites). Now
you have a package that can build from source. ;)

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall | Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us | http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/ | SysAdmin @ Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/ #196285 | http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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