Exherbo

Overview

Purpose

Exherbo is a distribution designed for people who know what they're doing with Linux. It is inspired in many places by a source based linux distribution -- in particular, it supports flexible source-based installation with up-front configuration.

Exherbo is not a fork in the conventional sense. Although it shares some code with other distributions, and although many concepts are similar, and although many of the people involved were or are involved in other distributions, most Exherbo code is rewritten from scratch.

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 attempts to meet everybody's needs rather than just those of its developers.

In other words, go and use Linux From Scratch or Ubuntu please.

Why the Need?

It's not that we think that other distributions are 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 a well known source based distribution. Unfortunately this wasn't a viable long-term approach.

While other distributions are quite adequate for many people's uses, there were certain aspects we found to be problematic, including:

Portage. The code can't deliver the changes we need in the timeframe we need. Portage hasn't delivered many features needed by developers; for what we're trying, it's completely out of the question.
Management -- We see the need for management which will make necessary decisions within an acceptable timeframe and provide and ensure that there is direction.
QA. We would rather have a small number of developers working carefully on a few things, and fixing each other's mistakes, than working prolifically on a great many things without such attention to detail.
The users. Many other distributions attach a lot of importance to the community, to the detriment of the distribution's technical needs. We'd prefer to focus on meeting both our own needs as developers, and the needs of the real users -- a solid community follows on from a solid product.
The developers. A developer base polarised between those who make thousands of changes every month and those who make perhaps a dozen each year does not make it easy to push forwards the sort of improvements we want.
Lack of overall design and direction. This problem is widely recognised by some distributions but often enforced by policies allowing everybody to start their own subprojects without discussing it first. The idea is that volunteer work shouldn't be prevented but rather encouraged. We'd rather focus on a few clear goals and provide solid solutions in those areas rather than trying to do everything at once.

Ultimately, we believe that current source based distributions were a good starting point. However, to provide what we need and what we want, a new generation of tools and development is required.

Design Goals

Phrase all design goals in such a way that it is hard to use them as slogans to justify stupid changes.
The target user has a good degree of familiarity with Linux.
No interactivity requirement. Controllable, repeatable behaviour with up-front configuration and information.
Flexibility where it makes sense to provide flexibility.
No single set of defaults. Rather, a small collection of sets of defaults that are good for their target user base, and that between them cover most target user classes.

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. Exherbo isn't in a fit state for users. We might get there one day, but it's not a priority. Right now, all we care about is getting it into a fit state for a small number of developers.

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.

Really, all we provide is a few things that the few people working on all this find useful for themselves. When we have something for anyone else, we'll let you know.

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.

The above paragraph does not apply if your pet project is something we find interesting.

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.