Sorcerer Multilib

Well, when Kyle was building a multilib implementation of Sorcerer, I thought he was wasting his time. He got a newer, faster computer, and in the space of a couple of months he built enough of a Multilib distrobution for me to start beta-testing.

It's truly a statement of the power of Sorcery to be able to entirely reconfigure the way the distrobution fits together, and have dependencies resolved automatically, in the space of a couple of months. I don't even think that Multilib was Kyle's main objective... he was slogging through our grimoire of spells, and I suppose he needed a distraction and something to challenge his mind.

So far, beta testing is going well. One I/R beta had uncompressed tarballs on it, and the installer could not handle that. The next I/R beta had a broken glibc, but Kyle mailed me a proper one. Soon my computer was running a multilib install and I was able to run quite a large chunk of software ever written natively, and the rest through emulators. Quite a feeling to know that you are operating something that could run any software ever created. :)

Unfortunately, a small change to Sorcery blew up that install. I should have backed up my filesystem, I know. Two days of troubleshooting later, with me doing broad strokes and Kyle investigating the particulars, we tracked it down to cp misbehaving in a Sorcery script, and so we had to use the force to fix it. "-f" in two places in one script, and I am well on my way of having a completely rebuilt Sorcery Multilib install. It's amazing just how much everything fits together, and how a small error in millions of lines of code could have such a huge impact on the stability of the system.

Some of the tricks I am using here is an MBR that lets me select which install of Sorcerer to run. Right now I am running x86_64 pure, and rebuilding the multilib in chroot. I'm thinking of reconfiguring the boot loader to just include the "other" boot option, rather than having three boot loaders, as they don't play well together, and I have been using a rescue boot disk much more often than I liked.

So, bleeding edge, wave of the future stuff in OS land here. One day this Multilib will be the default Sorcerer install. There are still some things to be sorted with the installer. It's certainly not for the feint of heart. We have been battling to get it more simple, for years, actually. Unfortunately, once a Sorcerer box is installed, it tends to stay that way. Most horrible blow-up-your computer errors usually happen to me, as I like to thoroughly test all my software at least once a month. When my system blows up, I usually restore from system backups when I remember to make them. So, the installer does not get used nearly enough... Maybe I'll have a bit of time to do some testing in that regard.