Thank you for MX snapshot!

[asqwerth]

I enjoyed the bits of history recounted here! I'll be honest and say that I had no idea Adrian was involved in MX-Snapshot.

It shows the beauty of collaboration, and also the ties between people in the MEPIS community who developed antiX and MX.

[operadude]

I enjoyed the bits of history recounted here! I'll be honest and say that I had no idea Adrian was involved in MX-Snapshot.

It shows the beauty of collaboration, and also the ties between people in the MEPIS community who developed antiX and MX.

+1

GOLD...
PURE GOLD

Go Team MX

[Artim]

RefractaOS is the originator of this cool tool, which then appeared in antiX and later in MX. It's very, very cool that different distros can share innovations like this! Congratulations to all three distros!

[Adrian]

RefractaOS is the originator of this cool tool, which then appeared in antiX and later in MX. It's very, very cool that different distros can share innovations like this! Congratulations to all three distros!

I guess you didn't read the thread. RefractaOS has NOTHING to do with it.
Can't find anything about Refracta release before 2017 (not sure what was their first release, the oldest files on sourceforge are from 2017, the project site itself was started in 2011)

Look at this, it's from 2015: https://github.com/adrianTM/mx-snapshot-old
And this is from 2010 https://github.com/MEPIS-Community/remastering-script and communications about it with anticapitalista going back to 2008.

[Nokkaelaein]

I guess you didn't read the thread. RefractaOS has NOTHING to do with it.
Can't find anything about Refracta release before 2017 (not sure what was their first release, the oldest files on sourceforge are from 2017, the project site itself was started in 2011)

It is potentially confusing because there has been so much contradicting info about this around , as there is so much association between MX Snapshot and the snapshot tool in antiX which, in turn, includes the mention:

Code: Select all

# adapted for antiX by anticapitalista@operamail.com 
# from version="refractasnapshot-9.0.6-2 (20121026)" by fsmithred@gmail.com
# which was based primarily on refractasnapshot-8.0.4  by Dean Linkous

As in, the closeness of the projects has "traditionally" made it easy to assume something of a direct timeline between the different snapshot tools. And that has been repeated in different places through the years.

Even in the MX Linux wiki it currently says, in an old article about MX Snapshot:

Code: Select all

Development history: Fsmithred (Refracta linux), anticapitalista, BitJam (antiX), Adrian

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/help-files/hel ... -snapshot/

It's been great reading more insight in this thread, of the actual history, and the way these tools have been developed

(Edit: in the MX Linux wiki, at least here too: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/mx-tools-credits/ )

[Adrian]

Somebody made a mistake and it propagated. Snapshot is build by me and BitJam and it uses technologies that we came up with. I barely heard of Refracta before, never used it. I don't even know where or if they have a public gitlab or github with the code of their app.

I fixed our Wiki.

[Nokkaelaein]

I fixed our Wiki.

Also as a heads up, just checked this mention is included on github in the current docs of MX Snapshot as well:

https://github.com/MX-Linux/mx-snapshot ... pshot.html

Code: Select all

<p>Development history: Fsmithred (Refracta linux), anticapitalista, BitJam (antiX), Adrian</p>

[Adrian]

It's annoying to have wrong info snuck into even in the tool you are building (I just copied the Wiki to the offline help file at that time)... thanks.

One thing I'm not sure is where the remaster script originally came from, I didn't build it but I was talking about it in 2008, Refracta didn't show up on the radar till 2011, @anticapitalista do you have any idea who made the remaster script for you (is it possible that Fsmithred did it?), you thanked me for helping you with the first antiX but I don't think it was me. I just took the script around 2008 and developed around it and eventually it became mx-snapshot.

[Adrian]

One source of confusion, it looks like antiX used a script that was based on Refracta's script https://github.com/antiX-Linux/antix-sn ... apshot-gui but that doesn't seem to share genealogy with https://github.com/MEPIS-Community/remastering-script Refract script is from 2011, I worked on ours at least since 2008 and it uses different technology like mount binds not rsync.

[anticapitalista]

@Adrian - Yes, it is confusing.
I started a remaster of MEPIS 3.4.3 (2006 IIRC) called Flepis that shipped with fluxbox and someone helped me with it with a set of commands to remaster manually. It might have been you, I really can't remember. I wasn't too keen on MEPIS 6 and 6.5 (Ubuntu based) so after the first antiX version-6,5 (Spartacus) I went distro-hopping to sidux, Kanotix and Debian. Both sidux and Kanotix had some remaster scripts to build their isos and I toyed with them, but I then went back to remastering MEPIS 7. At some point, you wrote the remaster.sh script to automate the process (antiX-M8 I think was built this way) and I used it to build antiX iso files up to version 2012 when BitJam and I worked on what is now the build-iso scripts.
The refracta snapshot script (modified) was first used on antiX-12 and was only used for users of antiX to make a snapshot of their installed iso. It was not used to build antiX isos as we started to use early build-iso scripts as mentioned before. I'm sure Dave from antiX was also involved and probably some others too, but I can't remember.

So, MX Snapshot was not based on the refracta scripts (as I first thought) and its prototype actually pre-dates it by 3-4 years.