Slashdot Mirror
New Linux Distribution — Exherbo, Announced
An anonymous reader writes "Former Gentoo developer Bryan Østergaard recently announced a new linux distribution aptly named Exherbo. The distribution, which has been underway for a couple of months and is based on ideas and experiences from his long work with Gentoo, features a new packaging format and several subprojects, such as a redesigned init system. Currently no installation medium is available but their package tree is public for the daring ones who want to play with the upcoming distribution. The developers strongly discourage any serious use though, as it's still highly experimental."
A new package format. Just what we need. ... Oh well must be a slow day.
Man I have to admit that after reading the site I really want noting to do with this distro. Why is it even on Slashdot?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"aptly named Exherbo" I've read both FAs and I can't see why. Am I missing something obvious?
I'll probably get modded down by the groupthink mods around here (hint: metamods: moderate any downmods as unfair)...
but really, is this what the Linux user community needs? Yet another Linux distro. Wow. And maybe we can add a new window manager and another variant of Firefox/IceWeasel/Netscape/etc.
It's really a shame for F/OSS that, time and time again, there is such a huge duplication of effort and half-assed half-finished projects lying around in the junkyard of the Open Source cemetery.
There are tons of linux distributions that are "new" and more ambitious than this one. In fact, reading the project aims on the website gave me the impression that this is a highly specialized project by somebody who has an axe to grind with the gentoo community. With so many existing gentoo variants out there with larger scope and communities, I am having problems appreciating the notability of this article and why it's even on Slashdot. I normally expect tighter coverage of Linux topics than this.
Sheesh, don't we have enough non-BSD non-SYSV unix init systems yet? Solaris has their own, Mac OS X has a different one, and I think I recall hearing some other distro changed theirs as well. This fragmentation is irritating for sysadmins and gains little. Have these people looked at the other systems out there (Sun's, Apple's, etc) and seen what needs of theirs are not met? Perhaps extending one of these would be worth considering...
Altho honestly, I find SysV style init to work just fine.
I'd like to see the rationale for creating yet another new packaging system. What's wrong with the current ways, and what will the new way fix?
It's not that we hate you (unless we do). It's just that we have nothing to offer you, and you have nothing to offer us. They don't have a finished product. They don't even have a product yet. There is nothing to see, and they say it as well. Post this on slashdot when there is something to see. Then they will be happy about the traffic and the press, but now it's just a link to a page that says that maybe, one day, there will be yet another linux distro that wants to make everything better and nicer than the current Big Players(tm).
Most of the minor distros are specialty items like Knoppix or toolkits like Trinity Rescue CD. Having more of such isn't going to hurt anything. Besides, projects like this are a good way of trying out radical ideas without breaking anything. And I suspect the answer to "not teaming up" is that it seems that many developers would rather be Chiefs than common braves.
Do we need more of this elitistic bullshit?
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Exherbo is not, at the moment, a user-targeted distribution. It supports packages that the people involved find interesting or useful; it probably does not support your favourite desktop environment or applications. That kind of thing will come later there are plenty of other options for users who want a distribution that does everything badly rather than a few things well.
It's not that we think that Gentoo is bad. It's just that we think we can do something that suits our needs better. We've tried, without success, to do this using Gentoo. Unfortunately, Gentoo has serious shortcomings in several areas that stopped this from being a viable long-term approach (...) Portage. (...) Gentoo management. (...) QA. (...) The users. (...) Lack of overall design and direction.
Thank God there's much more to that distro you don't think is bad at all.
- OK, I Want to Try Exherbo.
- No you don't.
- Yes I Do
- OK, maybe you do, but we don't particularly want you to try it because we don't want to deal with you whining when you find that absolutely nothing works. (...) We don't provide packages for lots of things you consider critical. A lot of the packages we do provide don't work. A lot of the packages that worked five minutes ago all just broke because we just decided to redesign several large features. We don't provide support. We don't provide install media. We don't provide a usable init system.
- But I'm a Developer, and I Want to Try Exherbo
- Well, you know who to talk to if you need to be told where to find the shiny things. And no, we don't want to use Exherbo to implement your pet project. Especially not if it's a stupid pet project. Go and inflict it upon Gentoo, they think that porting ebuilds to run on SunOS 2 ksh under Cygwin is a great idea.
Wow! It sounds great! Do i need a secret decoder ring to read the sourcecode?
Seriously. I'm a Gentoo user and this sounded like a great thing to peek into - Gentoo is not without its share of things to fix/improve. But come on. What exactly are they announcing here? A distro tailored for a handful of users (which is nice) that we can't download, try or even ask about.
In Conclusion: It's not that we hate you (unless we do). It's just that we have nothing to offer you, and you have nothing to offer us.
Sounds like it's coming along great, eh? Do us a favor and make your work public when, you know, it is useable by the public. Or even watchable.
While some points made are valid (eg portage, along with most other package managers sucks, and Gentoo's management is inefficient) it seems like the distro is completely misguided.
If anything, we need to be focusing on user-friendly *nixes, not developer torture - less still something more hellish than Gentoo. If someone desperately wants a system like this, they can read LFS. Or strip down a Gentoo install. That way, they're also more likely to get something that's more suited to their needs. And isn't written by someone who looks like they'd happily eat n00b stew for lunch.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Sorry, but in my mind, Gentoo died about the time Daniel Robbins gave up on the thing. And I can't say I blame him, either. Gentoo has to be one of the most spectacular failures in Linus Distro history. Constant bickering so nothing ever gets done. Flames that make even ESR's diatribe about Fedora look tame.
Gentoo was a good idea. Unfortunately, the man with the vision couldn't seem to keep it going in one direction.
My blog
And who do you think is responsible for most of the flames and poisoned dev environment over the past 4-5 years? Shockingly most of the same folks who are driving this new project...
Personally, I think it's great. Hopefully it'll draw Ciaran's buds away from Gentoo and maybe eventually Gentoo will be fun again.
But yes, losing Daniel was a tremendous loss.