Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has been released!

Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has now been officially released!

As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'.
Spells listed on the 0.20 release wiki were tested and qualified to
have no known defects of "gating" severity at the time of this release.
The tarballs have been signed and uploaded to our server.

To download the grimoire manually, get
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.asc.

I would like to thank Eric Sandall (sandalle) and Mathieu Lonjaret
(lejatorn) for searching the base system spells for bugs and testing them.

Check out the version 0.20 wiki page for more details.

Source Mage European Meeting

Do you like mages, Linux and hacking? There is still some heavy discussion on the mailing list about the Source Mage GNU/Linux European Meeting. The good news is, if you are interested in finding out more, there is now a wiki page dedicated to it. This would be very cool to attend, so check out the European Meeting wiki to see ongoing updates to the event.

News (4-7-2008)

Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has asked for some checking to be done on the latest Stable release, version Stable-0.20. He states the new release will be on schedule, but would like other people to test spells to make sure it is stable.

Arwed von Merkatz aka Alley_Cat has just been voted the new Grimoire Lead Developer. Congratulations to Arwed!

Many Source Mage developers have been discussing a European Meeting. They are still discussing a date, but they think the location will be somewhere in Germany. If you are interested, you can follow the discussion on the Source Mage discuss mailing list.

Ismael Luceno has been writing a new spell called Spellfoster. In Ismael's words, "Spellfoster is inspired by debfoster, a Debian tool that makes removal of unwanted applications a trivial task. We have "dispel" and "gaze orphans", but from what Eric Sandall and Ismael explained Spellfoster puts a dialog around orphans which are not held, making an easy to use list. It sounds interesting, keep up the good work Ismael!

We have a new developer! Long time user Jeremy "Belxjander" Sutherland has joined the circle of Mages. He is interested in working on Cauldron, Init scripts, Grimoire and more. Welcome Jeremy!

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has sent me some nice git tips. I will be posting them soon.

Sorcery Usability Study Results

Today, our own Jaka "lynx" Kranjc sent out a revolutionary e-mail. This one could change the course of Source Mage GNU/Linux forever.

"Fresh users keep confusing sorcery commands up and some of the experienced users occasionally complain about that too. So me and my friend S. A. (a HCI student) have made an usability study on how to improve the situation. We realised that the simplest thing to do would be to shorten the command names, so they consume less biomemory, save you from RSI and give you more time for other unimportant stuff.

Implementation notes
The proposed fix is to implement wrapper scripts (since aliases don't work everywhere) with the mentioned user-friendly names. The scripts would be put into /sbin, so they'd work even if you had /usr mounted on an unreachable network share or otherwise unavailable. When your system is in dire need of assistance, it is really annoying if things you are used to working with don't work anymore (a double annoyance).

So here is the sorted initial list of the shortcuts and what they woud run:
cc - cast --queue (who can spell queue anyway?)
cp - cleanse --prune
dd - dispel --downgrade
gs - gaze search
gv - gaze version
sg - sorcery upgrade
sh - sorcery hold
sq - sorcery -q
su - scribe update

As you can see, the list contains only the most frequently used (sub)commands, so feel free to suggest more. I also do realise that 'su' could be thought of as 'sorcery update', but since the latter is used less often, scribe has precedence. Maybe 'sup' or 'soup' would do?

The code is already in my repository, I'm just waiting for your comments, mages, so I can finalize it to perfection."

Unfortunately, this met with some criticism. ;)
But possibly some new ideas?

flux_control says:
"In my opinion these are a very bad idea. They will confuse users more (because the meaning behind them will be hidden), and worse, they will confuse the user's system (try doing a "cp X Y" when cleanse is renamed..or compile something with cast --queue? :-P). In my opinion it's better to keep the sorcery/cleanse/etc., but clean up the name space for consistency. As an example, dispel -d doesn't dispel (well,
OK, it does, but it also casts, which is the important part). This should be moved to cast -d in my opinion. Also, having all the different cast/gaze/cleanse/scribe commands accessible via sorcery (like sorcery cast $SPELL) would help, because then users really only need to remember one command: sorcery. If they forget what to do with it, RTFM :) If someone wants the short commands, then they can make their own aliases or wrapper scripts."

Ladislav Hagara says:
"I also do not like this idea. It is very confusing. Moreover most of your shortcuts are regular names of Unix commands.

For new users I would created links started with smgl- (smgl-cast; smgl-dispel; smgl-scribe; ...) so if user does not know the right command he/she just writes smgl- and presses TAB and can see all sorcery commands.

Users can use bash-completion."

Sandalle says:
"That may not be a bad feature to have added: symlinks of smgl- to ."

Swoolley says:
"man sorcery
see also section"

Sandalle says:
"Yeah, just thinking of those who like TAB completion or are new, have RTFM'd, but can't remember the exact command."

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc says:
"> Users can use bash-completion.
This can go in with the boring namespace. So for every command there'd be a sm- or smgl-$command and a smgl-$(boring $command) (like smgl-uninstall). Not sure if this should be part of sorcery though, as it is trivial to implement in a spell and less trivial in sorcery.

The shortcuts can be done the same way and then the spell added to basesystem."