Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has officially started his term as Cauldron Lead (previously held by Karsten “BearPerson” Behrmann) and to go with it, he has posted to the sm-discuss mailing list that he has a working test ISO, but is minimally tested.

“I have been struggling with a few udev issues as the ISO system transitions from the ISO initrd to the real ISO filesystem, which is why there hasn’t been good news from me. However, I think I just figured out the (hopefully) last of those problems, and if so then the ISO should be ready to go tonight. I’ll send another mail to the list to let everyone know.

On the plus side, I did manage to test some of the ability of the new ISO for autodetecting hardware, and it seems to go well. Of course, that means that it was only minimally tested, since I don’t have a farm of machines to test on here. This is something I would really like tested once I release.”

David “dkowis” Kowis notified that he has finished the upgrade of our bugs.sourcemage.org bug tracker software to bugzilla 3.0.4. After upgrading and adding a horde of optional/required dependency spells for bugzilla, he is now asking for developers and users to use the tracker and to report any problems found.

“I’ve upgraded bugzilla to the latest stable version.
I don’t think it created any problems. We’re on the default theme, but that’s okay. All the spiffy graphing thingies seem to work. All my queries seem to work.

Poke around with it and make sure it does the things you need it to do.

Tangent:
I think I’m going to make an Adminstration category in bugzilla for ways to poke the admins ;) (it’d be helpful to me anyway) And it lets us log when you guys ask for stuff :)”

More details from the Source Mage European Meeting have been posted: The meeting will occur from August 17th to the 24th in Bonn, Germany. More specific details were announced. See the European Meeting wiki page for more details and a list of activities and atendees.

Jaka “lynx” Kranjc has added a new library, libtime, to devel sorcery. This library adds “how long it took to cast” functionality to gaze, which in my personal opinion as a developer is quite handy to detect unnecessary steps among other things. This library seems to be based on a patch submitted by Jaka himself on January 2006.

That’s all folks, thanks for your attention!

Grimoire lead Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz has just posted to the mailing list that stable-rc 0.23 has been cut in the repositories and tarballs are being propagated to the mirrors. Announcement follows.

“Hi everyone,

stable-rc 0.23 is cut and ready for testing. There’s the usual wiki page for those who want to help testing.

The release is on time and will be released on July 15th if nothing major gets in the way.

Tarballs have been created and are on the master server, should make it to the mirrors in a few hours.
The chroot for x86 will be done by me during the next days. Volunteers for a x86_64 chroot are welcome.

As always don’t forget to file any bugs against our bug tracker so we can fix and integrate any bugs/issues.

Let’s give this new stable-rc a good testing!”

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!