I have see the big blowup in the sidux forums about smxi. There have since been several posts stating that using smxi with sidux is "dangerous" and can cause an unusable sidux system. Is this true? if so, why? If not, why not?
TTYL
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I can't address the technical issues involved, but I can give you an average user overview.

I switched to Linux in April 2008. I tried sidux in July 2008. I have tried a few distros since, but my main production machine is sidux ever since. No problems which I wasn't the cause of.

smxi is a tool which has made this possible for me. I have followed smxi ever since I started using it. I have had one deal with h2 personally and found him to be very reasonable. If h2 says it can be done, it can be done. If he's not sure, he says so. Straight talk.

It works for me. Just do your homework before a major operation like a d-u. Check sidux d-u warnings and check the script's pages.

h2 has put together a solid tool and has generously shared it with the Debian distro world. The sidux devs do amazing stuff too. These appear to me like magic, kind of like automatic transmissions. I'm willing to work with both groups even when they can't work together.

Putting aside all the politics, emotions, and posturing...

The point the sidux team makes is that if you want to use this script, you are free to do it and you should get your support from those who provide the tools you use. They don't want to be distracted from what they are concentrating on to support something you do not get from them. They don't express it in easygoing terms and you might be a little put off by the attitude, but, they are not wrong.

The forums here are very informative and helpful, so use smxi with sidux and be confident, the folks who put these things together are genius at what they choose to do.

Just one average users assessment.
Take it or leave it.
It's your system, use it how you want.
Your results may vary.

Bob
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kb0hae, no it's not true. At least not what you typed, re smxi being dangerous. I prefer amenditmans's tone, but the more extreme views of sidux devs, generally voiced by slam, you can totally ignore since they are not based on any empirical reality that we can discover, and are more or less the intellectual equivalents of climate change deniers, ie: cherry pick single data points to discredit thousands of data points that show the opposite, invent stuff, make statements with no empirical testing or facts behind them, and so on.

By the way, their views on aptitude are also not really based on any real testing that I can see, if you take what they say about smxi seriously, and don't use it, in fact you are FAR better off running your system off aptitude than apt-get in sid. And that's why Aptitude is the official debian packaging tool, it's what builds the businesscard/netinstall systems by default. I've switched to it and now when I am forced to use apt-get in a problem situation I can't believe what a poor tool it is for most cases where some conflict needs resolution in apt. But you can rest assured, none of the sidux devs have actually tested that claim either on a real install, they just repeat what the others say without doing any actual work or testing. Bad engineering, bad methods.

But I do agree with how amenditman prefers to see this stuff, it's a better way to move forward in general since we can't undo or change the underlying largely emotion driven actual issues.

It was, however, nice to see that apparently most sidux users more or less agreed with my view of things, and about the utility of the xi tools, and have largely left sidux behind, although I can tell you that from what I can see, most sidux users who do still use run sidux are also using smxi, which I find fairly amusing given the public stance of the devs. A core group of a few hundred don't, but that's about it. So the devs basically accomplished exactly nothing in this split, except making sidux smaller and making it get a much maligned reputation overall. That was their choice too.

But sidux still does a good job acting as an enlarged debugging pool for Debian Sid, for testing some new features, like insserv, and a few other isolated things here and there. And their hotfixes in apt are useful for sid users in general. And the installer gives you a quick sid install if that's something you find useful, but for me I'm finding more and more I have to undo their defaults which kinds of defeats the overall point, since with real debian, I also have to undo the same defaults, so there's not a huge difference anymore. But there's a reason their numbers have plummeted, the users were not impressed or amused, but that's fine too I guess, sidux is now about how the devs want things to be, not how the real users wanted them to be. smxi was just a way to encode what users asked for, and to fix issues they found difficult to deal with, including, by the way, issues that people like slh used to directly give me to insert into smxi...
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Thats about what I thought...sidux devs have told a few people that using smxi for doing a D-U is dangerous with sidux. I didn't think it was true, just sour grapes. I do check the warnings in the sidux forums, and shen running smxi, I check the warnings and look to see if anything is being removed. I have not had any problems with smxi except noted in my other recent post about an xorg error.

Thanks for the info!
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Not so long ago, smxi was readily accepted as a way to upgrade. It's what brought me to sidux in Dec 07 and I've been there ever since. Smxi is what upgraded me to KDE4 when all that went on. Just recently I have followed H2's guide and put Firefox on my box and that's turned out awesome for me.

Is it sometimes quicker to use apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade? Maybe. I use that too. But rest assured my box still goes to smxi on occasion. (google earth comes to mind thanks harold)....... Personally I love inxi over infobash (nuff said there)........

Assuming for the moment that you want a distro to "grow", I'm not sure why this all went on. Due to smxi, I have learned more than I ever thought possible because I delved into the linux world to begin with. For the average user I'd have to say it's been awesome to have smxi as a part of the linux community. Just remember smxi is supported here........not there. Also watch out for some commands they'll have you to execute I noticed one a while back where they "tricked" a fellow into something that showed the smxi script and last time it was run. Although that didn't turn into the big deal I thought it would (wheeew I was glad to see that).....just something to remember.


Anyway I can tell you that in two years it's never caused a problem here. (smxi).

Good luck
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Well,
nearly a year ago sidux-team-members have been started to warn about that "evil"script.
Before that it was praised at some kind of "swiss army knife" for updating sidux and still it is praised within the sidux-webshop in the descriptions of the CD-/DVDs (I checked again minute ago).

I guess a lot of sidux-users use smxi (me included of course) and have not really experienced any serious difficulties yet.
As with every onstantly developed/adapted tool there might be some glitches or minor problems form time to time but never ever something really serious yet. And of course there has always been fast and responsible help here within the forums.

Additionally smxi has now grown up to be usefull for quite a number of debian-based distributions, so if I might change sometimes the distributiion one of the criterias will/might be: ist it supported by smxi ?

regards

Reiner
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smxi is the best thing to happen to any sid-based distribution. I trust h2/techadmin, so I continue to use it.

It's made life easier. Whenever I had any requests or bug reports, h2/techadmin has always stepped up and volunteered his time and effort to help me and other users. I've seen the code evolve from its roots and I can say that significant efforts were made to keep it maintainable and modular.
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yeah, i have been using smxi since the kanotix days, before sidux was started. when the sidux devs starting the sh*t about smxi, my account was silently disabled by one of the mods because i disagreed with them about smxi

at this point i still run sidux, with smxi, on one of my boxes, and also run pure sid with gnome, also smxi, on another box.

i far prefer the sid / gnome setup - even though the sidux devs repeatedly warn that gnome too is "dangerous" for sid.

bottom line: smxi has about 4 years of proven reliability for me, and i highly recommend it
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for me is the same ;)
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hi

I am still a virgin when it comes to Debian system being ex-Mandriva.

The sidux devs are correct in suggesting have patience during any DU or system upgrade as packages might not be in synch.

Instead of learning to "hold" packages myself, I still read the upgrade forum but rely on smxi.

I do read what packages are going to be removed....at the smxi command prompt or my manual apt-get prompt.

2) I am old school ...preferring to rebuild a system from each distro release than stay rolling.....and I use that evil that a certain dev at sidux has venom for.....partimage.

FWIW partimage has saved my bacon more times that I can remember....but I do terrrible things to my system.

I try to be smart with my time......smxi eases all my upgrades.

3) strangely Distrowatch count is higher than I remember.I saw it the other day at 23 now 24 and when I was doing IRC with them it was around 27

regards
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