Exherbo
Exherbo is specific and unique community/project among open source world.
They don’t want to be community like gentoo. As one of develoeprs, ciaranm says “community in the open source context means people who don’t contribute anything but think they have rights”. He even doesn’t want to call Exherbo a community. Instead he likes term “developer base” which he describes as “group of useful people who contribute and mostly get on fairly well with each other”.
This community states about itself, that “Exherbo doesn’t have users, only developers”.
And you will quickly find it yourself if you try to install exherbo and something goes wrong.
If you haven’t read documentation extensively (including maling list and irc) and ask some trival or stupid questions on irc, you will be banned from #exherbo channel. That’s what happend to me.
But there is hope for us lame users. Ban can be removed if you show that you have made your homework and ask for removing ban.
Such behaviour may seem rude and harsh to user who is used to helpful gentoo or ubuntu community.
It’s clearly understandable when you know when they come from. Most of the developers are ex gentooers. And they didn’t liked what was happening with gentoo. When it’s difficult to change any element of distribution, and there is more management then real work, you quickly see stagnation and frustration. It stifles innovation.
So they started from scratch. Not exactly from the ground, because they use many elements from gentoo and improve them over time. Some of the ideas may go to gentoo like it’s happening with pms.
They have their own vision about distribution development. They claim, that 20 core developers is enough for them and they don’t want to go beyond this amount. They consider that more developers will create mess and put away fun.
Instead they created infrastructure which will help to control such huge amount of work like creating distribution is.
They use distributed scm (git) which helps them to “divide and conquer”. Instead of one big repository with 10k packages they have tiny core repository called arbor. There are also topic repositories like x11, gnome, mozilla, etc.
It’s easier to maintain that. You don’t have to read throug one big log. In one repository you see commits only from that repository. If you don’t use gnome, you don’t have to bother with gnome. Just don’t include that repository.
And that works from opposite direction. If some users want anything that isn’t in core, topic or developers repositories, they can create their own repository and use it. It can also be included to exherbo unofficial repositories, so it will be searchable by other exherbo users with paludis.
Another important parts of exherbo are paludis – package manager and exheres – package format. There happens many small improvements which move exherbo step by step into right direction.
Also you have to know how exherboers communicate with each other, what is the workflow. Most work is coordinated through irc. Package requests are tracked with unwritten repository and are searchable with package manger. Buzilla and maling list aren’t used extensively. Every commit to official repositories is visible on irc thanks to cia bot. Most talk and fun happens on irc.
If you want something to be done, don’t demand it. Help developers and make it yourself. Than everobody can focus on what gives most satisfaction. Be developer.
