Ciaran McCreesh’s Blag
Now with 17% more caffeine
Paludis, Gentoo and Exherbo
Bryan has announced his pet project: Exherbo, a partially-Gentoo-inspired distribution. Exherbo uses the exheres-0 package format, which is implemented by Paludis. Exherbo is currently extremely user hostile, has no installer or documentation and has a huge list of things that don’t work, but then if you care about those kinds of things you’re not a target user just now.
I’ve been running Gentoo on my desktop and Exherbo on my laptop (the first Exherbo install on real hardware) for a while now, and I don’t see that changing for a good while. So for those of you who’re wondering what the situation with Paludis is, and for anyone looking for a link to dispel any “Paludis has its own distribution now” FUD:
- Paludis is going to continue supporting Gentoo and 0/1-based EAPIs. I personally don’t think Gentoo is useless.
- Paludis is going to support Exherbo and Exheres-based EAPIs too.
- It’s likely that most of my package format proposals will be sent to Exherbo rather than Gentoo because I’d rather see things implemented in three weeks than in three years. Gentoo is of course free to carry on using any ideas it realistically thinks can be implemented.
- Exherbo isn’t a Paludis-specific distribution. If other package managers want to implement Exheres and keep up with the rapid development until
exheres-1is stabilised, they’re more than welcome to. - Exherbo is Bryan’s baby, not mine. I just happen to think it’s a nice baby and am putting considerable effort into ensuring that it grows up to become the kind of adult I find interesting.
- Paludis is fine with supporting other distributions, if we sensibly can.
Note that Sabayon is not one we can sensibly support:
lxnay> i'm the sabayon linux chief arch lxnay> Just wanna know the implications of integrating paludis ciaranm> you use binaries, right? ciaranm> paludis doesn't do binaries currently, and when it does it will use a different format ciaranm> that's probably the big issue... ciaranm> other than that there's nothing major. with 0.26 we'll even be able to do special distribution-specific stuff for you... you'd just need to give us a .conf file for your distro and compile with --with-default-distribution=sabayon lxnay> well if you devs are interested in sabayon, just contact me ciaranm> lxnay: we don't care about sabayon, in that none of us use it. but we have no objection to supporting it, if there's demand from users lxnay> bah lxnay> die alone then -!- lxnay has left #paludis
which is a shame…
That is a pretty great irc conversation. “What do you mean you guys don’t want to work on MY distribution?”
Fucking hilarious. I’ve just lol’d mah pants off.
This is clearly a political mistake. You guys are marvelous writing code, but if you want to manage projects you want social skills.
It’s curious that you think we don’t. The Paludis and Exherbo teams are both larger than any single active Gentoo team, and neither have anywhere near the management problems that Gentoo has.
This is why I prefer Calculate Linux and Gentoo over crappy Sabayon anyday! That guy should just go die silently.
But, speaking of Paludis, Exherbo and Gentoo – I´ve been tracking your fork for quite a time and I´m more than impressed. You are building neo-gentoo, with the spirit gentoo had in ´00-´02. Instead of spending energy on useless talks, you just routed it to make your dream come true. I´m very impressed. Gentoo is dieing now and will die soon. It has very advanced ideas which keep people (that managed to understand it) using it, yet has high barrier preventing new ones to come. I hope you will improve the distro past complexity, allowing even not very technical savy to use it at some point. Either way, Im savy enough to try it out anyway – will do soon. Keep up good work. There is high chance you are probably most advanced and powerful distro on planet in birth stage now (exherbo).