sorcery

By anders pearson 15 Mar 2002

after reading a few intriguing reviews last week, i decided to give Sorcerer Linux a try. the thought of a distribution that was completely compiled from source on my own machine and had the ability to automatically keep all the software installed completely up-to-date was more than enough to make me drool.

so last friday night, i backed up all my data and made careful notes of my hardware configuration. on saturday i went to download the ISO image for the install cd from what was the current site at the time, sorcerer.wox.org. instead of the page i’d seen before, i was redirected to the lunar penguin site. there had been mention in a few of the reviews that Kyle Sallee, the main developer of Sorcerer was getting a job and wouldn’t be able to continue working on it. from what i could glean from a quick look at the lunar penguin site, it looked like kyle had finally given up and abandoned sorcerer and lunar penguin had taken its place. i decided to hold off on installing just to let things settle down a bit.

so i installed Debian instead, spent a few days trying unsuccessfully to get networking working, gave up on debian and reinstalled mandrake. all the while i read through the Sorcerer mail archives trying to figure out what had happened and what direction things were moving in.

what i found was absolutely fascinating. it was a little more complex than just being kyle running out of time and energy to work on the project. while none deny that kyle is a fantastically talented coder who did some great work, there were apparently some personality conflicts. he would consistently reject patches that others contributed. in general it looked like he only wanted contributors who would do exactly what he told them and who would do all the grunt work for him. but he would refuse any contributions that came with input on the direction of the project. all this time, he was loudly complaining that if people didn’t start helping him (on his terms only) SGL development would have to stop.

naturally, flame-wars ensued on the mailing list, egos were damaged, tempers flared, and kyle became less and less coherent. some of the other developers, who were largely interested in having periodic “stable” releases forked the code and created the lunar penguin distro. around saturday, something in kyle snapped and he took down the sorcerer web site, replacing it with a redirect to the lunar penguin site. from this and some comments he made to other people, it appeared that he was stepping down from SGL and was endorsing LP.

meanwhile, the rest of the sorcerer developers, free from kyle’s restraints got busy picking up the pieces, reorganizing and getting things going again. they put together a new website and got back to work on the code.

but things got weirder. the original SGL website changed from redirecting to LP to an almost surreal manifesto. unsigned and written in the third person, attacking the LP team and the SGL developers alike and making vague, questionable legal threats. no one seems to have heard directly from kyle since it appeared. he hasn’t come forward to either confirm or deny that he wrote and posted the diatribe or to answer any of the many rebuttals to it.

after following this whole saga i figured that at the very least i should install sorcerer just to make sure it was worth the time and energy i was putting into researching it. the amount of activity and the speed with which the SGL developers recovered the project after kyle pretty much deliberately tried to kill it assures me that SGL isn’t going to be abandoned anytime soon. technically, i have yet to hear any criticisms of it beyond bug reports on some weird configurations.

so i downloaded and installed. i started wednesday night and, because i hadn’t RTFM’d carefully enough, i screwed some stuff up and couldn’t get it to boot without a rescue disk. it took about 5 minutes on irc yesterday to find someone who knew how to fix it to help me out. when i went home last night i made the change and everything started working flawlessly again. i got networking up without a hitch, updated the system, rebuilt it so the binaries of the minimal system that came on the install CD were replaced with freshly compiled and optimized ones. compiling is slow so that took pretty much all night. i started xfree86 compiling before i left for work this morning; i expect that it’s still going as i write this. i’ll still have to compile gnome and kde before i have a whole desktop machine again but already i’m impressed with how smoothly things have gone.

when you go to compile an app, sorcery automatically figures out all of its dependencies, downloads those and compiles them. i’m not really done yet but so far i’m definately impressed with sorcerer. with some UI work on the installer and better documentation i think sorcerer has what it takes to be a major distribution. being highly optimized, configurable and constantly updated should make it the distro that all the “cool” geeks are running within a year or two. of course, since the install takes so long and you need to know a lot about linux just to get it working, we’ll probably still be handing out redhat or mandrake CDs to newbies.

Tags: linux sorcerer politics opensource