Wizards Assemble!

Source magic.

Been around longer than both, but in general, it just werks and it's very UNIX-y

Holy cow, how is it possible that's barely known to anyone?
distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sourcemage

It only reveals itself to those who art worthy.

hAHHAHAHAH yeah my shit nigger

enjoy your python katamari

that katamari is working fine, you are just pushing this meme onto community without any sane reason

portage isn't even mandatory. You could use Palaudis if you want, or dnf, or yum

...

>Here's a list of common commands: pastebin.com/i4DALaNV
Did this cringefest come from the same bunch of crusty neckbeard larpers that came up with awful names like "GNU Tools Cauldron", "GNU SIP Witch", "GNU Media Goblin" etc.?

dont bully the wizards

I'm willing to try it out... but the stable versions are incredibly old.
Is it really worth the time?

Use the test version.

What are you talking about? This only makes distribution more fun to use. Bring back fun into computing, it was lost over the years with introduction of brogramming, TV shows, smartphones, social networks and other things targeted at the general population. You must be member of that general population. There is nothing wrong with that, but you don't have to be rude towards "crusty neckbeard larpers".

$ daemon sorcery >/dev/null

Go here if you want to know the difference with gentoo:
sourcemage.org/Comparison with Gentoo

It's seriously very interesting. Sourcemage wants to be a wrapper around LFS. They're using bash to lower the number of dependencies, and to make everything more simple.
I'm on gentoo right now, and I'll definitively test sourcemage.

interesting

The whole thing reads like some D&D nerds wanted the AUR without Arch then threw in a bunch of dude wizards lmao jargon to hide the nonsense. I might try it if I fuck up on gentoo again.

The wizard stuff is really fucking annoying and is the main thing putting me off of touching it.

Also I started using OpenBSD lately and it's actually THE Unix-like we've all been clamoring for

With package managers being the principal difference between any distro family, I'm happy to see a decent attempt at making the package manager itself just another installible component of linux.

The only thing that makes Arch ARCH is the package manager. The only thing that makes Debian DEBIAN is the package manager. All of the other bullshit is insignificant minutiae.

OpenBSD is best for routers and firewalls and good for servers, but it's lack of any kind of simple, yet reliable mechanism for restricting potentially malicious code running locally (MAC's like apparmor, namespaces or any kind of sandboxing tools like firejail) makes it too insecure for desktops

it's called "not installing any random shit" and "not running shit under root"

...

Have you seen the Linux bugtracker?

So you consider yourself superior to all of us right?
You know exactly what is infected, what have backdoors and we are all idiots near you? You're literaly unable to make any mistake, that's why any protection is useless for you? Why are you not at ring 0 then. Ring 3 is for peasants, isn't it?

That's maybe because of this that you don't like the "sorcerer" naming. How dare they use some kind of joke theme for someone as important as you...

:^)

Too bad the last sentence destroyed your larp.

I didn't say anything of the sort. What I said was "stop installing untrusted programs", and "stop giving untrusted programs more permissions than they need". I said nothing about backdoors, or some sort of divine revelation.

The sorcery stuff is just annoying and confusing. Butthurt that I don't like your shitty wizard meme? It was fun in SICP... 33 years ago.

literally everything not part of the base system is untrusted, including everything from the ports
I'm not saying that the software itself necessarily needs to be malicious, I'm saying anything that's not heavily audited like the base system might have some buggy code that introduces vulnerabilities and fucks you over, therefore it's untrusted
and how do you propose I do that?
and please don't say:
chroots are insecure by design
too much overhead, and having each program on the system in a vm would be a pain in the ass
I don't have the time to view and edit the source code of each program I install

When I say untrusted, I mean in your opinion or point of view. I trust php-5.6.31, or gettext-0.19.8.1p1, as they come from reputable development teams, and have a strong history of not being pwned.

I am less likely to trust PassCrack64-13.37 if it's something I haven't heard of and know nothing about.

administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/abusing-chroot-for-security/
github.com/earthquake/chw00t
serverfault.com/questions/454899/why-chroot-is-considered-insecure

I'm not saying it's hard, it'd be nice if every program from the ports tree was patched
but that's not the case (only for now, I hope)
and having to go through the code for each program I install and figure out exactly which system calls it needs is a pain in the ass and a waste of time for me if I can just use GNU/Linux with apparmor and firejail

These questions apply to Linux and potentially pure POSIX situations.

In response to chw00t, the OpenBSD-applicable chroot escapes require root in the chroot and active knowledge of the running system for ptrace().

You don't need to personally go through the code to be sure of all the system calls a program is making, this can be done with static analysis, but there are other methods.

has firefox been patched?

fair point I guess

python used to be broken to me but after I updated last weekend it fixed my shit.
I used qbittorrent without the search engine for the longest time.

I have done the most ricer-ish of things on gentoo and it never broke on me outside of python.
It's not the mid 2000s anymore.

Source Mage is pretty fun.

please naturally select yourself

Rude.

see

There is no reason to use python when you could just use bash. While that's a minor issue there is a huge trend in software to re-invent the wheel every time a problem has to be solved. All these different solutions to the same problem do is prevent people from learning and applying general purpose solutions to problems.

Apparently this distro is about as old as Gentoo.
Why haven't I head of it before?

Pypy and cython exist, bash will always be slow as hell.

Asking myself the same.

Because it fucking blows

Both Sorcerer and Gentoo were first released in the year 2000 and both communities were small, but very active.
The difference is that Sorcerer ran into some problems around 2002 and split into 3 distros: Lunar Linux, Sorcerer and Source Mage.
The creator of the original Sorcerer parted with most of the dev team, but retained the name Sorcerer for his fork and took it offline and into oblivion.
I don't konw anything about Lunar Linux (it appears to be effectively dead), but Source Mage is what was left at the end.
By the time Source Mage was first released, Gentoo had already amassed a large and vibrant community and most of the original Sorcerer userbase had left after the fallout.
Although in the beginning, both distros were very promising, Gentoo was able to gain much more momentum at a very critical time and it left Source Mage in the dust.
Despite all this, Source Mage is still a good distro.
The package management tools work well, and there are people still working on them.
But because it's so small now, there's just not enough people to keep all the spells up with the upstream.
It's sad really, it really is a unique and interesting distro, but it's been slowly dying for quite some time now.
It'd be a shame to let it die.

For those who are interested, you can read some history here:
sourcemage.org/History
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage#History

The wikipedia page for Sourcerer mistakingly says that the initial release was in 2007 for some reason.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(Linux_distribution)

And dash is faster than both of them. While bash is not completely POSIX you can use it to run POSIX scripts. I don't see any benefit/reason to go off the standard for things that make the OS work.

Gentoo is dying too honestly, I haven't seen people talk about it outside imageboards as much as I used to do 10 years ago.

I personally use dash for /bin/sh and then my terminals run bash. Whenever I think of setting up zsh I just use the time to play video games or watch anime instead.

Have you ever tried to write bash scripts with proper error handling, data handling, and job control? Maybe you should so you'll understand why everyone who actually writes code dropped bash.

Dying might not be the right word, failing to grow in market share might be a better way of looking at the problem. Linux in general has been getting more and more popular but what if the more esoteric distros have just not kept pace with that general growth ? The population of people who use source based distros has probably not gone down but the number of people who use linux has gone up.

Most consumers want something that "just works" and can't be bothered to care about systemD or having an optimized system. Whenever I search for almost anything linux related it's talked about in terms of ubuntu.

What's the point of source-based distros? Both Debian and RedHat ensure their shit builds from source and that's been true for nearly 20 years. Are they just for posers who want to be seen with a lot of compiler spam on their screens?

Sure, but they never made it easy. Gentoo and other source based distros did.
On gentoo I can just run emerge and I can customize my packages with simple configuration files, on redhat and debian I'd have to write a billion scripts myself and in the end I'd be doing the same thing the gentoo guys have already done for free and better.

we need to save source mage

apt-get source and dpkg-buildpackage are pretty easy.
Can you give an example of something specific you've personally done that would have taken 'a billion scripts'?

He's talking about installing something not in the official or unofficial repos.

wat
You mean he wants to make a package from scratch? That's easy on Debian as well, debhelper/cdbs does 99% of the work with very little noise.

their init system appears to be some kind of dependency based sysv-like init

explain?

what

However, we also have a collection of non-free packages (the so-called "z-rejected" grimoire, containing packages such as java binaries, or nvidia drivers), most of them up to date, even though we do not officially maintain them.

they're not pushing their users towards it though

Considering that a root password that basically turns off all security exists on all Unixes, the best rule of thumb for Unix security is: don't depend on programs that are too complicated to personally audit. OpenBSD already has a fully functional and excellently documented base system. Plus, packages and ports exist and are maintained, so it's not like you are forced to compile everything by hand (the OpenBSD team actually strongly recommends that users use packages so that they can get security patches quickly.) You won't have 200 applications that all do the same thing in the repos like with Linux, but this ensures that the quality of the binaries is always high.

Also, if you were really worried about security, the last thing you would do is run GNU software, which is notoriously buggy and insecure.

In any case, nobody gives two shits about what you do on your PC, so "desktop security" is moot.

Source Mage is user friendlier than Gentoo.
I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to try a source based distro but doesn't want to get into all the complicated portage stuff.

It's shit.

neat

There is no reason to use bash when you could just use C.

There is no reason to use C when you could just use Lisp.

Call me when they go the extra mile and get FSF certification.

I cannot use software which may lead users astray to the dark arts.

Hw so? Apple and Sony are some of the biggest contributors to BSD.

What, you think companies want to maintain their own billion line patchlists?

gentoo has become too mainstream
use source mage if you want to be trve kvlt

Dark magic has always been an important school of magic, user.

Wingardium GnuOSa

give me your dotfiles boy

Hello CIA nigger.

Lad...

...

Similar to how Jesus Christ only reveals himself to those who truly seek Him. Only then do people actually realize how wonderfully He is.

How would one use musl instead of glibc on Source Mage, and more importantly, is that a bad idea? I see on musl-libc.org that it's not difficult to build the toolchain using musl-cross, but how do you tell Sorcery to use that by default where possible afterward?

why though

How is this like void linux?

I don't think asking the user to answer a bunch of questions every time he installs something without detailed explanations nor defaults is very user friendly
I tried SMGL myself and even though I've used gentoo, I ended up breaking something a couple of times
on gentoo, you can just go with the default desktop profile and change USE flags for which you know the purpose and consequences of enabling/disabling

Why not?

True. I've been running it for a while and it's good, but Gentoo is better in most ways. For example, I got the system running just fine, but decided to add an optional dependency to a late addition. However, there's no way to automatically rebuild everything else that could also use this package. I'm not the first one to wish for this feature because I see on the bugtracker an issue for it that nobody is interested in.
tl;dr Source Mage is interesting in a LFS sort of way but it's not suitable for a serious project.