This Week in SMGL (Oct. 29th 2007)
First, the server woes are being taken care of by Jeremy Blosser as quickly as possible. Hopefully the data center technician will be able to solve the current hardware problems as of today, October 29th. Jeremy already has plans to do some migration to another server and some mirroring for interim outages. So the official Source Mage GNU/Linux web site and git server are in good hands. Jeremy did mention that your donations to the server cause has helped immensely. We thank you for your patience during the recent down times.
Last week, Andraž “ruskie” Levstik merged the xorg-modular repo into a separate branch in the SMGL grimoire tree. Ruskie stated that this is to comply with the schedule that was recently discussed on the #sourcemage-grimoire irc channel that we get xorg-modular into test by the end of the year. Eric Sandall has been working towards this end by making relevant changes to the monolithic spells to deprecate into -modular ones.
He also noted this to developers:
“All further development on xorg-modular is to happen in the devel branch. I’d ask that also any further updates are to it are first made in the devel branch and only after some runtime tests to be put into the main grimoire. Reason being that the xorg devs have a rather bad track record of breaking backwards compatibility since -modular exists. Hence why I would ask for any critical updates (libs, server, devel drivers (noted by odd version numbers (usually 1xx or similar)) be not put into test unless they are well tested beyond the “does it cast” requirement we have.”
I asked Andraž a few general questions about this merge, but instead of posting the questions and answers, I’ve summarized the discussion.
There is no longer an actual devel grimoire. This is a feature branch of the master tree. If developers want to work on xorg-modular, they would make a local branch based on the remote/devel-xorg-modular branch and work from there.
If you are a user and want to test xorg-modular, Eric Sandall mentioned fixing the grimoire tarball generation scripts to pull from this feature branch and thus still providing a standard xorg-modular.tar.bz2. Mage Power will be sure to let you know when this has been completed.
If you are currently using xorg-modular, you do not need to make any adjustments. The updates to -modular are few and far between and other than running from git there shouldn’t be any issues. Those that do use git should be more than capable of figuring out how to get it to work.
The final news from last week is about the install guide that was mentioned in last week’s “This Week in SMGL”. Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has made additions to his SMGL install guide and placed it on the Source Mage wiki. Thanks goes out to Jucato, we appreciate his work on the guide.