Some of you may have noticed that Mage Power looks different, but for those of you that didn’t, we have migrated Mage Power successfully to a WordPress install hosted on a dedicated server machine owned by Odin (a long-time Source Mage user). Thanks go to Andraz “ruskie” Levstik (our games grimoire maintainer) for arranging this for us and to “Odin” himself for allowing us to be hosted on his server.

Along with the move and the migration, I personally worked on getting the Kubrick theme tweaked following some of Paul’s comments, so if there are any issues or just want to suggest something, please let us know.

Jaka “lynx” Kranjc sent us this helpful bit of information on working with Git and our grimoires, mostly for developers.

I noticed a long drought on magepower, so here are some git tips (mostly) for developers:

You can see the contents of files in other branches or tags without checkout-ing them first:

navaden@lynxlynx main-grim 0 $ git show :VERSION
0.19-test
navaden@lynxlynx main-grim 0 $ git show my-stable-rc:VERSION
0.18-rc

All git commands are accessible directly. So by using dashes instead of spaces, you can reap the benefits of tab completition. It shines for longer commands like git-update-index or git-cherry-pick. Also all the man pages need to be called this way.

Through long time use, the git repository gains some dead weight. You can remove it and reoptimise the repo by running git-gc.

Here’s a handy git-commit wrapper. It will shorten the writting of the commit message by adding the basename of the first argument and a colon as the initial commit message:

git-commit(){
  command git-commit -e -m "$(basename -- $1):" "$@";
}

git-commit smgl/guru-tools/ ChangeLog would result in “guru-tools:”.

Not many people do cherry-picking, but for those who do, we have an informal policy that the -x option needs to be passed to git (adds the originating commit to the commit message). In older git 1.4 versions it was on by default, but this has changed since.

alias git-cherry-pick="git-cherry-pick -x"

If you want to reset only a part of the repository, you’ll have to use a trick (git-reset --hard can’t work on single files):

git diff some/path | patch -p1 -R

Which should do it in most cases, but will likely fail for binaries. Here is an alternative approach which doesn’t have that problem:

git-dir-reset(){
  rm -r $1/*
  git-archive --format=tar ${2:-HEAD}:$1 | tar -x -C $1
}

You could also do it via git-checkout, which can do single files too.

Hey there!

I want to draw attention to the Personal Grimoires wiki page, where some of our developers (and users) have listed their personal grimoires. This may prove useful, for instance, if certain spell you want is not in the main grimoires, but it might be in one of the personal grimoires. Even if the spells are outdated, you will not have to do all the work to create the spells, since they are already written.

Also, for a while now I’ve been hand-packing a xorg-modular tarball (our official “testing” tarball has not been updated since the grimoire got inserted into a branch for later merging into the main grimoires) and signing them with my personal GPG key (18615F19) for verification. They are all available at here on Simply Sam (my personal blog/website).

Have a sorcerous day!

Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.22 has now been officially released!

“As usual, users of stable merely need to run ’sorcery system-update’. Spells listed on the 0.22 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-0.22.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.22.tar.bz2.asc.

Thanks go to Eric Sandall and Martin Spitzbarth for providing the chroot tarballs, and to the whole team for providing a pretty bug free base system :)

Check out the version 0.22 wiki page for more details.”

Hello everyone!

Firstly, allow me to introduce myself (for those of you that don’t know me): I am Elisamuel Resto aka ryuji, developer for Source Mage (like Paul) and the maintainer of the php-pear section of our grimoire among other things. I have been with the project since January 2007 and now volunteered to help Paul with Mage Power.

Now, I would like to share some information to bring you up to date. This is a somewhat lengthy post, you have been warned.

Last post on Mage Power was the release of stable 0.20 grimoire that was shepherded by myself. Right now, stable 0.22 is slated for release tomorrow 06/12/2008 after being delayed due to a important update doing the initial commit freeze. This release is being shepherded by Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz.

On some other news, Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer was promoted to Lead Developer! He was nominated, seconded and subsequently elected by a small margin as the Cauldron Lead. Congratulations, Justin!

Eric “sandalle” Sandall posted to the list giving the final warning on the developers list cleanup, to which I personally helped Eric gather information from all the listed developers. Since it was posted, the deadline was met and right now all that is left to do is request the accounts for removal to our current Project Lead, Jeremy “emrys” Blosser, or, in case he is unable to, David “dkowis” Kowis (the Project Lead’s current assistant). Thanks go to Eric for his effort.

Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer posted on the sm-discuss mailing list that from 06/11/2008 to around 06/22/2008 he was going to be unavailable, and that he was attempting to release updated 0.10.0 devel version of our install ISO, but this was trampled due to the compile taking longer than expected. He commented on a later reply that he will attempt to finish it while he is away from home, but noted to not count on it.

Andraž “ruskie” Levstik, who has been handling the voting for Justin’s General Lead position and the Cauldron Lead elections, noted that some of the current general leads have been failing to vote in the past two vote calls. As suggested by another developer, I take this opportunity to bring to attention our policy, which states that general lead developers who are not marked as away and fail to participate in the voting processes for two consecutive months or longer (provided that there have been at least two vote calls in the interim) are automatically removed from Lead Developer position without vote or veto.

Lastly, for those people interested in encryption of paritions/filesystems, Vlad “Enqlave” Glagolev has added the loop-aes spell and other needed changes in the grimoires. All feedback is welcome.

Thanks for your attention and until next time!