Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has announced there is a new test ISO available. This one includes a few bugfixes from the one uploaded a few days ago. They need as many testers as possible, so please download and send your feedback to the SM-Discuss mailing list.

URL for ISO download: http://stash.bearperson.de/smgl/devel.iso.bz2

The md5 url: http://stash.bearperson.de/smgl/devel.iso.bz2.md5

Today, Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall released Grimoire Stable-0.17. The announcement follows.

“As usual, users of stable merely need to run ’sorcery system-update’. Spells listed on the 0.17 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 and will be propogating out to the mirrors within six hours.

To download the grimoire manually, get http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.17.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.17.tar.bz2.asc.

I would like to thank David Kowis (dkowis) and Remko van der Vossen (wich) for helping test spells.”

Sorcery Lead Jaka “lynx” Kranjc announced a brand new version of Sorcery today! You don’t know what Sorcery is? Read this. The announcement follows.

“I’m happy to announce that stable Sorcery 1.13.7 has been released! It is mostly a bugfix release. Notable changes include the fix for the config_query_list item mapping problem, a working url_ftp_verify and the inclusion of the is_depends_enabled function.

Now don’t go updating sorcery just yet, the tarball hasn’t reached the mirrors.

Here is the ChangeLog:
2008-01-11 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* 1.13.7 Release

2007-11-30 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* libdepends: finally satisfactorily fixed the sorcery rebuild pausing for hours #13735

2007-11-23 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* sorcery: rewrote show_installed_spell and fixed remove_pkgs - removing spells from the sorcery menu works again
* mirrors/SOURCEFORGE: updated list from #13504
* scribe: fixed error message when swapping nonexsistant grimoires #13253
* gaze: fixed matching of spell and short during gaze search #9433

2007-11-14 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* excluded: removed /var/yp - the one spell that uses it, installs config files there #11831

2007-10-30 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* libdepends: fixed some more quoting regressions since stable. Should eliminate some bad provider query defaults

2007-08-11 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* libcodex: moved the load_libcompat call before the sourcing of DETAILS in codex_set_current_spell. This way fallbacks can be used there as well, which will among other things help a bit with #13883
* libdepends: fixed a regression in private_add_depends; probably fixes #13735

2007-08-09 Jaka Kranjc <lynxlynxlynx@sourcemage.org>
* url_handlers/url_http: fix url_ftp_verify to not pass a deprecated wget option. Now it works again. #13001

2006-08-18 Andrew Stitt <astitt@sourcemage.org>
* libstate, libapi: add is_depends_enabled, bug 12949

2006-08-13 Paul Mahon <pmahon@sourcemage.org>
* cast: shorten screen names (fixes bug #12133)

2006-08-12 Andrew Stitt <astitt@sourcemage.org>
* mirrors/KDE: remove dead mirrors, bug 12978

2006-08-06 Andrew Stitt <astitt@sourcemage.org>
* mirrors/KDE: fix typo in poland mirror

2006-07-29 Andrew Stitt <astitt@sourcemage.org>
* libdepends: integrate fix for bug 12233, spells with regexps in names do not always become the default provider

2006-07-29 Andrew Stitt <astitt@sourcemage.org>
* libstate: fix bug 12904, get_depends_options is broken with spellnames containing regexp characters. Patch from Jaka Kranjc”

Happy New Year Mages!

Welcome to another issue of “This Week in SMGL”. The holidays slowed things down here on Mage Power, but things are picking back up again.

A large update was made to our Python spell lately by Vlad “Enqlave” Glagolev. A name change has been made after a thorough debate on the SM-Discuss mailing list. Many different suggestions were made, but in the end, a simple “Python” won out. Here is a break down of the changes written by Enqlave.

python: fix the huge bug in spell: when you have a lot of python modules installed (in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages dir), and want to recast python, it will recompile every module in that dir recursively, while adding every compiled (.pyc) and object (.pyo) files. So package of python becomes bigger with any new pythonic module/app. And if we want to recast python (remember — every module in site-packages must be reinstalled after python), then we need to dispel all pythonic modules first, then cast python, then cast all those modules. We MUST do it not only after minor version upgrade — but EVERYTIME we want to recast python, to keep it clear an proper.

Well, you should UPDATE your python spell now.
And yes.. a little history.. A week ago I found this bug, but I thought it was some “feature” and forgot about it. After updating some pythonic spells I wanted to recast python and noticed, that time for packaging it was a bit longer. Then I tried another python module — then recasted python again. It was bigger than the time before. `gaze install python’ answered the question. All this time we had such a real bug: python compiles every module and saves it in its install log and in the package. That’s because our system doesn’t use FAKE installations to the fake dir (for example like in OpenBSD ports system), so then we must expect such problems.. and here you are.. Pythonic one :)

This commit does:

• If you recast/update-to-a-new-version/recompile python — all spells which has some of theirs files in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages dir, will be recasted.
• First of all it dispells every such spell with adding cast_self trigger to it
• then it casts python
• finally it casts these spells

Well, I had ~50 pythonic modules @ my lappy box. after dispelling some unneeded I tried cast -c python while having these ones:

• 4suite
• bzr
• cherrypy
• flup
• libgsf
• libxslt
• pycairo
• pygtk2
• pysqlite
• pyxml
• sonata
• wesnoth
• blender
• bzr-gtk
• exo
• genshi
• libxml2
• pil
• pygobject
• pygtksourceview
• setuptools
• vte
• wxpython

With the huge spells like wesnoth (yes, it was compiled with python support :) and wxpython, it took ~55-60 mins on my 2.0GiHz/1GiB centrino duo lappy.

And, yes: comments/suggestions are welcomed!

Enqlave also made a large update to our perl-cpan section. If you want to check out the commit log, you can find it here. Enqlave mentioned there were 825 files changed, 1506 insertions(+), 1111 deletions(-); the build system for the whole perl-cpan section was renewed. Perl has updated to 5.10.0.

Here is a update from Treeve Jelbert on KDE4:

I, and some others, have sometimes encountered problems when building kdebase4 and kdeutils4 on a system which also has qt3 installed.

It seems to be caused by qt4 generating an include list which puts /usr/include in front of everything else.

This means that sometimes a qt3 file is found before the correct qt4 include file, as all the qt3 stuff is in /usr/include and not somewhere like /usr/include/qt

I have reported this to the kde project.

apart from manually editing /usr/src/kdebase-3.97.0/build/apps/konsole/src/konsolepart_automoc.cpp.files and
/usr/src/kdeutils-3.97.0/build/kregexpeditor/kregexpeditorgui_automoc.cpp.files

At present, I do not have an easy solution to this. Possibly change qt-x11 to install elsewhere, but that probably needs changes to lots of other spells.

Ideally, the kde project will adjust the order in which the include files are searched, but I don’t know how to do that.

On systems without qt3, everything builds and works fairly well.

Treeve also mentioned a correction to the above statement. It is kdelibs3 which installs some header files in /usr/include. Some of these files have the same names as those from kdelibs4, which are in /opt/include.
He then said he made a change to the default build for kde3 and now all the kde4 spells compile. Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) and Jaka “lynx” Kranjc has been testing these spells and verifies this.

Jeremy Blosser has opened up nominations for the Source Mage GNU/Linux Project Lead position.

Nominations for Project Lead are now open, until Wed Jan 09 07:00:00 UTC.

Please send all signed nominations to sm-discuss@lists.ibiblio.org as per http://sourcemage.org/SourceMage/Voting_Policy

I will ask someone else to run the subsequent vote if it proves appropriate.

So far Jeremy has been nominated again to lead the project. Nominations are near closed.

Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall has officially announced work to begin on the stable-rc-0.17 branch.

Stable-rc-0.17 branch is ready, the wiki page at Stable-0.17 is up, and the x86 chroot has been uploaded.

I hope you saved up some free time for the latest round in stable fix’n!

Last, but certainly not least, a recent announcement has been made by an SMGL developer.

Sadly, long time developer David Brown has announced he is leaving the distribution. He mentioned he has lost the passion and has other priorities at this time. He will be missed. We wish David the best of luck! Thanks for all of your hard work David.