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Exherbo announced. Sort of...A new distribution called Exherbo has announced its existence. It's at least partly inspired by Gentoo and has borrowed some Gentoo code.
Exherbo is not a Gentoo fork in the conventional sense. Although it
shares some code with Gentoo, and although many concepts are similar, and
although many of the people involved were or are Gentoo developers, most
Exherbo code is rewritten from scratch.
Exherbo is not your average distribution, nor does it aspire to be. In fact, Exherbo is not for users at all. Exherbo is designed to be a developer's playground. A place to experiment, to innovate, and to break packages with impunity. So far there isn't much there. The projects page lists only two projects so far: Arbor, an exheres-format (the Exherbo package format) repository for base system and assorted useful packages, and Genesis, which aims to be a replacement init daemon. There are two mailing lists available, the main development list and a commit mailing list. The source repository has some packages in git and a few more in subversion. There's a Bugzilla bug tracker too. So there isn't much yet, but the infrastructure is there to support what may come. Perhaps the most interesting part of the site for most people is the Planet Exherbo, a typical blog space for developers to talk about what they are doing, or would like to do, or whatever. For example you'll find this post [warning, site is currently reported by Firefox 3 as an "Attack Site", content can also be found on the Planet site] by Anders Ossowicki which explains:
First of all, Exherbo was announced because some elements of it will be
discussed at an upcoming conference. Rather than having a blank page and
let people start various rumors it seemed wise to at least let people
know what was going on. But in an effort not to hype it above what it
was, we didn't hand over all available information and code.
Unfortunately Slashdot picked up the announcement because some tard decided it would be a great idea to submit it to them. We did not do that ourselves because, as we state on the website, we have no need for users at the moment and exherbo won't fulfill users demands for the foreseeable future. That is not to say exherbo won't ever become useful but we're not there at the moment. Some very basic things still need to be worked out properly. So there it is. Do not download and expect a working distribution. Do not expect a release of a working distribution any time soon. But if you are a developer with an itch to scratch, this might be the place to so. Just to keep it all together, here's the original LWN announcement and all associated comments. (Log in to post comments)
Exherbo announced. Sort of... Posted May 22, 2008 2:31 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] Another replacement init daemon... what goals and use-cases does this one have that any of the 10 billion existing init replacements don't do? Upstart in particular has gained a lot of momentum, being in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian soon, RHEL likely in the future, etc.
Exherbo announced. Sort of... Posted May 22, 2008 7:32 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] upstart has been in Debian experimental for a while: http://packages.qa.debian.org/u/upstart.html
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