On 06/12/2021 17:51, Laurence Perkins wrote:
Source Mage is a spinoff of Sourceror and is kind of the opposite of Gentoo.
Well, I read the philosophy thing where it said it wasn't comparable
with gentoo ...
Gentoo is a source-based distro for people who want things to mostly just work
like with the binary distros, but also want to do customizations and
optimizations easily.
Unfortunately, I can be a bit gruff and not suffer fools gladly. Having
had a run in with the bug-wranglers over an issue that completely
screwed up my boot (nothing to do with gentoo, admittedly), but that
exposed idiotic decisions / other bugs in genkernel, I think I want to
look elsewhere.
Let's take a 2x2 truth table - do I have a boot partition, do I have
"automount boot" switched on. Three of the four options stomp all over
the live boot partition. The fourth fatal errors with "wah wah why won't
you let me stomp all over your live boot partition".
The REASON I don't want it stomping all over that partition is the last
time a distro (SUSE) did it, it completely trashed my boot leading to
several hours debugging and messing about in the systemd rescue shell to
get it bootable again. If anybody is going to trash my live boot, I'd
rather it was me, not an Artificial Stupidity software manager.
The wranglers' solution was simply to "use the no-install option" -
except that that promptly crashed with "can't find input files". Huh?
Changing the OUTPUT destination makes the INPUT files disappear? wtf?
Source Mage is a distro for Linux From Scratch folks who are tired of maintaining their
own package manager. They don't change*anything* from upstream in their packages,
(which makes it really easy to keep "updated" on their end) but the package
manager does have a lot of nice features for easily storing whatever patches and
configuration changes you choose to make in order to get it running on your system.
Well, if I have to get into maintaining emerge to get it to behave
sensibly, I might as well try somewhere else and see if it's an
improvement.
If you've always wanted to try LFS but tracking package files and patches and
configs and so-forth seemed daunting then it's definitely an awesome set of
tools.
Otherwise it's kind of a lot of work...
Well, given that I've got oodles of space (just added 3TB to my mirror
to give myself a 5TB raid-5 /home lvm, along with 1TB root/ lvm, I've
got plenty of space to play with distros. And I was shocked - 32GB of
DD4 was just over £100, so my new system now has 11TB of hard drive,
32GB of RAM, and a hefty 4-core Ryzen processor :-)
And the bits from shop screw-up mean the new raid testbed I'm building
will be a reasonably hefty system too - 4x1TB drives for hammering with
raid, 3TB backup drive, 16GB ram - just the thing for learning to kernel
program :-)
And seeing as I won't care about trashing it by mistake, I'll be playing
with KVM, and all those other fancy technologies to try and run multiple
distros stacked on top of each other :-)
Cheers,
Wol
