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-1 is 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…