Bryan Østergaard

Pictures from Open Source Days?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:47:32 GMT

This weekend saw yet another edition of the Open Source Days conference in Copenhagen. And despite a few small issues (most notably a large power outage taking out a big area of the city) most people really seemed to enjoy the conference.

I also saw quite a few people taking pictures of the event and we'd love to see those pictures. Please send an email to team2012@opensourcedays.org or directly to me at bryan@opensourcedays.org if you would like to share your pictures.

Looking for helpers for Open Source Days

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 12:43:18 GMT

With the conference just a week away we're still looking for volunteers.

Volunteering for Open Source Days means you'll get to know a lot of other open source interested people, broadening your network and you get to be an active part of the biggest open source event in Denmark.

You'll typically have to work 2 x 3 hours at the conference but for the most part you can decide what areas you want to help with and we do our best to coordinate your shifts so they don't conflict with talks you find particularly interesting.

As a thank you for your work we throw in conference tickets including the saturday night social event.

Right now I'm particularly looking for people with some video experience. You don't need professional video experience but a little experience goes a long way towards making the setup go more smoothly. We will of course make sure that people on the video team gets the needed instructions so don't be afraid of signing up even if you have no prior experience. The most important thing is your interest and dedication as that's what's ultimately going to it a success.

Besides volunteers for the video team we're also looking for a number of other people. There's too many different roles to mention them all here but we still need chairmen for example.

Please contact me directly at bryan@opensourcedays.org if you want to volunteer for the video team. If you want to sign up for the many other roles you can do so using our sign up form.

Open Source Days ticket sale now open

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:28:31 GMT

The Open Source Days conference opened the ticket sale a couple days ago. You can buy tickets for the conference itself as well the many training courses we're arranging in the days before the conference.

See opensourcedays.org for more information and pay attention to the early bird discount that ends about 5 days from now.

Also note that while there's not that many abstracts on the website yet we're going to keep adding batches of new abstracts. There's going to be a lot of interesting talks so keep checking the website for new abstracts and other news.

Open Source Days - Second call for speakers

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:25:02 GMT

The second and final call for speakers just went out for the Open Source Days conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Noteworthy news compared to the first call is:
- We moved the conference a week to make sure we have plenty of room for speakers, visitors and sponsors. The conference is going to take place at march 10 and 11 with training happening on march 9.
- We added information about conference size and being somewhat ambitious we're hoping to reach previous heights of 800-900 people.
- Extended the deadline for talk proposals. Deadline is now january 27th.
- User groups interested in a community booth also needs to start planning. Deadline is february 13th but you need to start thinking of activities, manning the booth and so on.

More information and details to be found on opensourcedays.org

Don't miss Denmarks biggest open source event!

Open Source Days 2012: Call for speakers

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:59:04 GMT

Open Source Days is Denmarks biggest open source conference and it's only 3 months away now. We are therefore looking for interesting speakers.

The conference has two focus areas, namely:

startups (everything related to startups / small business and open source software)
green technology (recycling, monitoring etc.)

Besides these two focus areas we also have several tracks with general technical talks. These tracks can cover everything from office packages to interesting new programming languages, network administration or other more technical areas.

See www.opensourcedays.org for the full announcement.

Being different

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 23:07:04 GMT

In Exherbo we like to do things a bit differently from everybody else. And today I got inspired by some recent experiences with users not quite reading all the documentation that Exherbo developers expected them to and wanting to change our documentation in a slightly different direction than we wanted to.

The usual solutions to such problems are either to reject patches, possibly marking them as invalid, or yell at people until they go away or start doing what you want them to. I went for a very different option though and tried to document what we expect from users (or developers as we prefer to see them) and the result of that is now added to our website.

All the feedback I've had so far has been very positive both from very experienced Exherbo developers as well as contributors very new to the project. I hope I can refine it a bit more over the next few days so feel free to add your comments. It's supposed to help everybody no matter their level of experience as developers or with the Exherbo project so I'd like to hear from lots of people.

Has anyone seen my pants?

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:02:45 GMT

They were last seen at JFK International Airport in New York last night and I miss them already. Please contact baggage claim if you've seen them and tell them to send the pants to Rochester International Airport where JetBlue is looking for them.

Or just bring them to FOSSCON tomorrow :)

Closing in on FOSSCON

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:57:58 GMT

FOSSCON is only 4 days away now and I'm trying to figure out all the things I need to do before the conference..

Plane ticket and hotel is booked (I'd be in big problems otherwise) but I haven't prepared my slides yet. I also need to find lots of small things like travel adapter, camera and all the other small things I wouldn't want to do without.

All in all I'm very excited about FOSSCON though, especially since it's going to be my first talk outside of Europe and I'm really looking forward to peoples reactions to my talk.

My talk centers around effective ways of building a developer community, mostly based on my experience from the Exherbo project. When I did a similar talk here in Denmark about 8 months ago most people were quite surprised at first but also found my ideas very interesting and I've had some very positive feedback from the people I've met again afterwards. I'm hoping the FOSSCON audience will be just as interested and that they'll give my ideas on managing open source projects some serious thoughts.

And if any one of you should happen to visit FOSSCON I won't be opposed to having a beer or two.. :)

Exherbo rejected my patch, now what?

Thu, 06 May 2010 22:00:04 GMT

Exherbo has a fairly strict patch policy that's usually summarised as "no patches without a damn good reason". Good reasons includes "Compile fixes" and "Security patches" at the very least but we do end up rejecting quite a few proposed patches.

I decided on this policy from the very beginning of Exherbos life as it's much easier working with upstream if we don't add patches against their wishes and it also makes it a lot easier for users to move to another distribution if/when needed (assuming that other distribution haven't patched the application(s) too heavily).

All in all this policy have worked very well for Exherbo so far but what can you do when you really, really want that patch for your favorite application? The first (and in many cases best) option is simply talking to upstream and convincing them that the patch is a good idea. That way all users benefits from the patch regardless of their choice of distribution and upstream takes care of maintainance and QA.

But what can you if that fails or you simply want a patch specifically tailored to your local needs? An easy way to solve that is through the magic of auto patching - paludis makes it quite easy to add local patches to specific packages any time you upgrade/reinstall them using phase hooks.

Below is a generic auto patch hook courtesy of Ciaran McCreesh.

$ cat /etc/paludis/hooks/ebuild_prepare_post/patches.bash
# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et :

(
   cd "${S}"
   patchdir="/home/users/ciaranm/work/autopatch/${CATEGORY}/${PN}"
   if [[ -d $patchdir ]] ; then
   einfo "Applying user patches"
   for p in $patchdir/*.patch ; do
   [[ -f "${p}" ]] || continue
   einfo "Applying $(basename ${p} )"
   patch -p1 < ${p} || exit 1
   done
   einfo "Done"
   fi
)

Before using this hook you want to change "patchdir" so it points to your own local patch directory. And then you simply add patches (files should be named *.patch) in $category/$packagename directories in your patch directory. As an example you could add a net-www/chromium/omnibar-http.patch file containing the following patch if you want to revert the recent sillyness of not showing http in the omnibar in chromium.

Source: Timothy Redaelli - updated by Elias Pipping
Upstream: Rejected, see http://crbug.com/41885
Reason: Do not strip http:// from omnibar!

--- b/net/base/net_util.cc
+++ a/net/base/net_util.cc
@@ -1452,7 +1452,7 @@
url_string == kHTTP && (!parsed.host.is_valid() ||
(parsed.host.is_nonempty() &&
spec.compare(parsed.host.begin,
- std::string(kFTP).size(), kFTP))));
+ std::string(kFTP).size(), kFTP))) && false);

new_parsed->scheme = parsed.scheme;

Adding local patches is now just a question of dropping the patch file in the correct path but keep in mind that you have the responsibility of maintaining not only your local patch but also anything it might affect (not limited to the patched package).

Exherbo at Open Source Days

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:29:58 GMT

The danish open source conference, Open Source Days, will run this friday and saturday. Exherbo will be present both days with quite a few developers in attendance.

I'm sure there will be a (little) hacking on Exherbo and related projects like Genesis but it's also a very good, if somewhat rare, opportunity to meet some of the leading Exherbo developers and talk to them about the current status of Exherbo and what's in the future.

Personally I'm hoping to have some good discussions about the kind of problems people currently face when they use Linux in various business settings and ways that those problems might be solved. I'm also hoping that you can learn something from the way the Exherbo project is managed and get an idea how the project manages to move at such a fast pace.

And finally I'm looking forward to meeting lots of people and having a good time :)

On Genesis commits

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:42:11 GMT

I've been asked a few times by different people whether they should push simple patches to genesis. The answer is a resounding 'Yes, please go ahead' but it seems like stating my policy towards other peoples contributions might not go entirely amiss.

My current policy (which will stay until genesis starts stabilising a lot more) is:

Any contribution is welcome so you just need to find somebody with push access (the usual Exherbo devs will do)
Large patches / feature contributions are also extremely welcome but you might want to contact me first and make sure I won't undo you hard work.

I'm not in any case going to complain about contributions (large or small) so don't hold back. And remember that I have a pressing need for people to play around with genesis scripts and tell me what you need from genesis. git://git.exherbo.org/genesis-scripts.git was created yesterday for this purpose.

And for those of you who don't have direct push access you can just cue your patches using the hacchi patch bot in #exherbo on irc://chat.freenode.net and I'm sure one of the friendly exherbo developers will help you :)

Genesis just got internal events

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:41:11 GMT

One of the big problems with Genesis was that you'd get its coldplugging events in that the events wasn't necessarily delivered in a sane order. I briefly considered different ways of controlling the order of the events but quickly came to the conclusion that was madness.

The solution I decided upon instead is generating an internal event after coldplugging is finished and send that event to all event modules. This way we can simply trigger on the 'genesis-started' event and start mounting filesystems and whatever else is needed for bootup.

So how can you help? What I need right now from you is just playing around with some homegrown scripts, trying to catch some events and telling me about all the things that are absolutely impossible to do without. Testing Genesis is quite simple and can easily be done without interfering with the rest of your system.

How to test Genesis:
1. Clone the git://git.exherbo.org/genesis.git repository
2. Run ./autogen.sh in the genesis repository
3. Run ./configure
4. Run make

5. Run sudo make install (by default it installs to /usr/local and won't conflict with anything)

6. Write a /usr/local/etc/genesis/config file

My current config file looks like:


[genesis]
# Currently supported log destinations are file and console
logging = console
logfile = /var/log/genesis.log

[modules]
command = yes
netlink-uevent = yes
netlink-route = yes

[netlink-uevent]
coldplug = yes
coldplug_mounts_sysfs = no
log_matched_events = yes
log_unmatched_events = yes

Ignore all the options except the coldplug_* options. The other options might be necessary due to the rather haphazard way configuration is implemented currently but don't expect them to work right now. The coldplug option enables/disables coldplug events and the coldplyg_mounts_sysfs option controls whether the coldplugging part tries to mount and umount /sys. You want to keep this option disabled unless you're doing actual boot testing.

Stick one or more bash scripts in /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-uevent/ or /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-route/ and try running: sudo /usr/local/sbin/genesis

The test scripts I'm using currently looks like (from /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-uevent/foo.sh):

SUBSCRIPTIONS_add=vcs10

add()
{
echo "netlink-uevent::add" >> /var/tmp/genesis.log
}

You can add any number of event subscriptions you like in a single script or spread subscriptions over several scripts. Each subscription is defined as SUBSCRIPTION_function=trigger

Trigger is simply a regex that matches the metadata from events in an internally serialized string format. Function denotes the function in the script called when matching that event. So all the above script does is triggering the add() function on all events matching the string 'vcs10'. Since I have coldplugging enabled I'm guaranteed to see that event.

And that's all there is to it.. One of the things high on my TODO list is to replace the regex matching with a udev like language where I can match on subsystem, MAC address or whatever other metadata events generate. I'd very much appreciate comments on what you think is needed in a simple language like that.

Remember Genesis? The oft mentioned new init system for Exherbo?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:46:53 GMT

If not you might want to read this old exherbo-dev post to refresh your mind.

Genesis started out as me being rather frustrated with current init systems and their huge failures. My basic idea was that all the different init systems fail badly at solving any real problems for system administrators and that it was about time fixing that situation.

So as I started really thinking about the problems that init systems should solve I decided that writing a new init system from scratch was the approach..

A short while later I discussed most of my ideas in a talk at FOSS Aalborg and had a fair bit of positive feedback. It's worth noting that I haven't started writing any code at this point and consequently my problems hadn't started yet.

When I did start writing code I quickly got even more ideas for Genesis and it became an even more ambitious project. And then it changed radically.. again and again.

Due to all the changes and lack of direction I didn't want to publish the code and it was often compared to Duke Nukem Forever (for good reasons I might add). But now that I finally seem to be reasonably sure about the direction I've finally released the code for everybody to peruse and contribute to.

The current status of the code is quite messy and it's not yet usable as an init system at all. You can glean the basic ideas of it however and there's a TODO list that you're most welcome to take a swing at. A few people have already contributed some minor patches for the build system for which I am grateful. I'd get around to fixing those things myself but for now I'd rather focus more on Genesis design/architecture and make sure that development progresses quickly.

As for progress I'm trying to make sure I do at least one Genesis commit every day and tracking that on http://calendaraboutnothing.com/~kloeri. Some days might only see very small commits but I'm shooting for larger, daily updates.

My primary goals right now is getting Genesis to a state where it can boot a system as well as making the code more hacker friendly so more people can contribute.

As for booting I expect to set up a separate git repository for genesis scripts as soon as Genesis is ready for that. It's my hope that most scripts will be contributed by other Exherbo contributors and that I can keep my focus on Genesis itself.

Half the solution..

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:38:26 GMT

For a long time I've wanted to replace the Developers listing on Exherbos website with a list generated from git log showing all the authors.

A while ago this got much easier as Ingmar Vanhassel and others added .mailcap files to our repositories. This means that some of my commits that I've accidentally made as kloeri@localhost can be grouped with kloeri@exherbo.org commits.

The actual page generation is still missing however so I'm looking for a volunteer that want to tackle this task.

Steps involved should be something like:
1. Clone git://git.exherbo.org/www.git
2. Read the Makefile to get an idea how our website is maintained. Reading my old blog post on our website setup is also useful
3. Figure out how to get a list of authors from git log. I just want a plain list containing the real names of all the contributors but without email addresses, commit count or other stats like that
4. Sort the list so it's easier to read
5. Make sure your list can be parsed by Maruku (a Markdown processor) and make sure it's processed along all the static .mkd files

Limiting the author list to just cover the arbor repository is fine for now.

Finally, give me a git format-patch of your changes so I can push it and we can all enjoy the improved website. Of course, you're more than welcome to ask me for help as needed.

Changes in Microsoft Windows EULA

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:14:30 GMT

My friend Peter Toft just blogged about an important change in the Windows EULA that could very well affect a large part of us. His original blog post (in danish) is available here.

But the short story is that Windows Vista allowed you to contact the manufacturer for a refund for the software if you didn't accept the EULA and Windows 7 appears to have removed that option. You can know contact the manufacturer to cancel the entire order or have them tell you which rights you no longer have because you didn't accept the EULA. Given how stubborn manufacturers are about refunding the windows license here in Denmark and several other countries I guess the Microsoft tax is pretty much impossible to escape now. The way I understand it this EULA change practically makes it mandatory paying for Microsoft Windows if you want a laptop for professionel use at least.

The exact part of the Windows Vista EULA mentioned by Peter is:

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the
software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for
a refund or credit..

The same part from the Windows 7 EULA is now:

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the
software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy. You
must comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the
entire system on which the software is installed.

I know of two current cases where Lenovo refuses to follow the Vista EULA and refund the Windows license. One being in Denmark where FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp is suing Lenovo and the other being in Hong Kong.

I'm curious how people think this EULA change will affect future refunds in different countries and how it relates to the different court cases in the european union and elsewhere that have already taken steps to limit Microsofts abuse of it's de-facto monopoly and secure free competition.

Please comment if you know of other current cases or have any information that can help keep open source operating systems an option when buying laptops.

Slides from my recent talk on effective community management

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:58:50 GMT

On October 24th I did a talk on managing communities more effectively and my experiences with that. The talk draws primarily on my experiences with Exherbo but all my points are more general in nature and can easily be used by other projects.

The slides from the talk also contains some advice for users on how to handle developers more effectively so there's a bit for everybody in it.

The original slides (in danish) are available at CommunityManagement.pdf and the english translation is available at
community-management-english.pdf

Exherbo is growing

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:37:24 GMT

Recently I've been talking about various community issues and how Exherbo handles them. I think Exherbo has been very successful in making sure people enjoy taking part in the daily maintenance and people have often told me that they really enjoy this aspect of Exherbo.

Not only are we solving technical issues that're interesting to people but we're doing so in a way that makes people want to actively take part in it. And while most people takes part in various ways a few have done some really outstanding work and I've wanted to thank them properly for a while now. So in true open source style I've rewarded them by giving them even more responsibility and full access to all our official git repositories.

A big thank you to Markus Rothe for all his PPC64 work, Elias Pipping for lots of Gnome related work as well as general bug fixes, Ali Polatel for his work on Sydbox as well as lots of Python and media related packages, Marvin Schmidt for his always good work and Thomas Anderson for lots of package bumps and fixes all over the place.

Looking for KDE minions

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:36:57 GMT

As the title says I'm looking for a few people to help maintain the KDE packages in Exherbo.

I'm looking for people who's going to actively work on resolving bugs and problems as well make sure we have all the latest packages versions in the KDE repository. Part of the work requires working closely with KDE upstream as you'll be filing bugs and patches upstream as well as applying upstream patches to our packages. We try to stay as close as possible to upstream and I don't expect too many problems from this work.

Standard Exherbo benefits includes:
- The very cute Exherbo mascot (yes, even as a frequent contributer you can use Zebrapig any way you like as long as you respect the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license)
- Verbal abuse from Ingmar Vanhassel and myself every time you screw something up
- Your 15 minutes of fame spend on a relatively small open source project

and finally

- You get to pick your own theme song as long as you keep it yourself

So stop being so lazy and step up to this monumental task now :)

Oh, you also get a few other minor things of course..
- Get to hang around some very cool and friendly guys (collectively known as the Exherbo contributors)
- Learn way more about packaging problems in Linux distributions than you ever wanted to
- Move up the hierarchy of open source developers due to your contributions, often helped by other Exherbo contributors

Please contact kloeri (myself) or Ingmar in the #exherbo-kde channel if you're interested in helping and we'll figure out how to get you involved in the KDE/Exherbo work.

Submit your Exherbo repositories

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:18:41 GMT

In Exherbo we employ a distributed development model where users can easily create their own repositories containing packages not otherwise available. Most users want to share their repository so other people can benefit from their work and quite often contribute updates and fixes in return.

But how do you find all these repositories? To solve that problem we've created the unavailable and unavailable-unofficial repositories. These two repositories index all the repositories Exherbo knows about (and is deemed of sufficient quality of course) and this makes it possible for paludis to know which repositories packages like powerpc-utils or bzflag are in.

All this is for nothing if you don't submit your repository for inclusion in unavailable* however so I'd like to remind people to submit their repositories. All you need to do is ask for it to be added in the #exherbo channel on freenode.

And you have a lot to gain by submitting your repository - here's just a short list of what you get in return:
- A reasonable thorough review of you repository with comments on things that needs improvement and explanations as needed
- The review usually teaches a lot of things about Exherbo and the exheres package format
- You get higher quality packages
- Other users can contribute to your packages in the future - you should expect updates, bugfixes and improved packaging from your fellow users
- Inclusion on Summer

So keep on creating new repositories and packages but make sure you submit them to unavailable-unofficial - there's lots of people that wants to help with your packages.

Managing an open source project? And want more contributors? And better contributors?

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:37:49 GMT

Looking at Exherbo we're very successful at getting people to contribute serious amounts of work towards the project. This didn't happen by mistake but rather by carefully considering what drives people towards contributing to open source projects and exploiting the knowledge gained from that.

Did I just say "exploit"? Yes, I did and I'm quite focused on "manipulating" users towards being useful contributors. I consider this manipulation entirely positive as it's just as helpful for the users as it is for the project.

So how do I do it? The first thing you have to realise is that most users aren't going to contribute just because you'd like them to. So you need to motivate people and you need to do so without it requiring too many of your own resources (resources being mostly time in the world of open source projects). Fortunately this turns out to be quite easy when you understand how developers grow from being somewhat insecure and inexperienced towards more proficient developers and (possibly) attain guru status.

You can compare this process to climbing a ladder and just like most other aspects of life this is more like a social ladder than a technical ladder. To gain guru status you first need to gain the respect of other developers surrounding you and the same is true when you're just starting out as an open source developer. Technical knowledge is definitely important but it's just as important that you gain the respect of your peers - without that respect they won't trust you to solve complicated problems and they won't involve you in important decisions.

What I do in Exherbo is that I make sure people can gain that respect as easy as possible without it affecting the project negatively. And I make sure to help people at the lower steps of the ladder in particular since it gets easier and easier to climb the ladder the further you go. Being an "outsider" with little to no respect among your peers (as would be the situation when approaching a new project) makes it much harder to gain any respect than if you've already shown you're capable of solving complex and/or interesting problems.

So how do I help people gain that first bit of respect? First of all I make sure not to solve the easy problems unless it's important that they're solved quickly. It's quite important that there's some easy problems that new people can cut their teeth on. Secondly I make sure that contributions from new people get extra attention - I want to make sure that they get immediate feedback and that their contributions are added to our git repositories as quickly as possible. And thirdly I make sure that their contribution is advertised among all the other developers and contributors. This way the new contributor gains a little respect more or less instantly and feeling slightly more secure should be able to take on larger tasks - it might take a good while before (s)he takes on any task that I'd consider non-trivial but we should be moving in the right direction and everybody should be enjoying the ride.

All this results in several positive things. We get a lot of contributors which was the original goal and the contributors improve all the time. Another really important factor is that developers and contributors that are already quite proficient can spend more time working on complex and more challenging problems. And contributors regularly tell me that Exherbo is the most fun project they've ever worked - I like to think that's because I keep challenging them ever so slightly and make sure they become better developers.

Summed up very briefly:
- Whatever you do, don't fix simple problems if they can wait
- Make sure that (especially) new contributors get as much credit as possible,
even if you did half the work or more
- Keep in mind that the hidden goal is to help each new developer/contributor
climb the social ladder in your peer group

And my final advice is to not be afraid of being an asshole. If a possible contributor is clearly unable to understand even the most basic directions and he's starting to drain a lot of project resources you should just kick him out. Otherwise he's going to keep draining resources and the most resources will be taken from new contributors that should focus on improving their own knowledge and skills rather than trying to help lost people. Kicking out such people (you can be civil about it of course) as early as possible might just save several other new contributors. I find it quite important to weigh the cost of possible contributors and focus on getting the most bang for the buck so to speak.

If you follow all this when managing your own project you should start seeing somewhat experienced contributors help new contributors climb the ever so important first steps on the ladder. They might not know they're doing this but you've created a community where this is the natural way of working and as long as you make sure the process doesn't stray too much experienced contributors are going to help keep the process running for you.

Planet.exgentoo.org is gone

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:41:32 GMT

or is it? Turns out the answer is "sort of". [1]

We originally (we being me and Alexander Færøy aka ahf) set up Planet Exgentoo when all former Gentoo developers was forcibly removed from Planet Larry despite most of them clearly being Gentoo users. As we thought many people would be interested in hearing the opinions of former developers as well as current developers and other users (those that had never been developers) we set up our own planet to cover the missing piece of the puzzle.

I had several good discussions with the owner of Planet Larry and we agreed on most things. Still it took quite a while before the former developers was added back to Planet Larry due to Steve being busy with other things. But when it finally happened we considered the case solved and let the planetexgentoo.org domain expire as there was no more use for it by then.

Everybody seemed happy at this point but it turns out that at least one person seemingly wasn't quite happy yet and he decided to register the exgentoo.org domain as soon as it became available. I don't think he wants to use it for anything other than prevent us from having it which is fine by me. As I've already said there's currently no need for Planet Exgentoo and if such a need should arise again (I don't think it will) we'll just register planetexgentoo.org instead. No harm done in other words except maybe for a little money wasted by a Gentoo developer.

[1] The exgentoo.org domain currently redirects to gentoo.org or some webmail system.

Any Exherbo users in Saint Petersburg, Russia?

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:06:55 GMT

I'll be going to Saint Petersburg this tuesday and plan to stay there a month or so. I'll be busy working on a commercial project while over there but there should be plenty of time to meet some local residents as well and enjoy the city.

I'm not sure what my schedule is going to be like but if you're in the area please give me a shout and we'll see if we can meet up for a beer or whatever. The best way to contact me after monday is probably by email at bryan.ostergaard@gmail.com but I hope to be present on irc as well.

Exherbo was announced one year ago today!

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:57:04 GMT

And to celebrate the occasion I'll be looking back over the past year, recounting some of our many successes and also given a glimpse into the future - at least the way I see Exherbo's future.

But first I'd like to thank all the developers and users contributing in various ways to Exherbo. According to https://www.ohloh.net/p/exherbo there've been 52 contributors so far but that's leaving out people contributing to Exherbo related repositories that Ohloh doesn't know about or contributing in ways not involving commits. My guess is that we have had 60+ committers during this first year which is very good indeed.

A big thank you to all of you - Exherbo wouldn't have been anywhere near as usable without your continued commitment.

State of Exherbo
At this point I consider Exherbo very usable and quite stable. There're still major changes happening from time to time but usually the upgrade path can be easily explained in a few lines on the exherbo-dev mailing list.

As for packages we have supported KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Awesome on the desktop for a long time now. On the server side we have most of the usual suspects as well including the apache and lighttpd webservers, samba, exim, postfix, sendmail and so on.

Many people are likely still missing a couple of packages but that's easily solved using importare, writing your own exheres package or requesting it in the #exherbo IRC channel.

Many people have also started to test Exherbo after we started publishing Exherbo images for virtual machines. Just recently it became possible to easily build your own Exherbo images from scratch which will hopefully lead to lots of new ideas for Exherbo and make it easier to mold Exherbo to specific needs.

A year of accomplishments
There's been too many interesting things happening around Exherbo this past year to name them all but here's a mostly chronological list of major events. All these events have helped shape Exherbo one way or another.

June 7th 2007
Stephen Bennett sets up the exherbo-dev mailing list. Everything keeps happening on IRC.

August 5th 2007
The old goatoo repository is killed and everything is moved to the new arbor and exherbo repositories. We still live in the dark subversion age.

October 13th 2007
Importare is born, makes life much easier as we have very few packages at this point in time. As described on http://ciaranm.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/managing-unpackaged-packages-or-whats-this-importare-thing/ importare is a paludis client allowing proper package installs, uninstalls and upgrades without an exheres. At a point where we still had very few packages beyond what's required for a base system install this had a big impact on Exherbo. Importare is as important today as it was a year ago as it allow to concentrate on widely used packages instead of spending time on more obscure packages.

July 5th 2007
Support for the Exheres format is added to Paludis. Officially it's described as a test EAPI used to play around with new ideas that might not be suited for Gentoo.

July 24th 2007
We solve the problem with colliding source tarball names by introducing arrows. This allows us to rename distribution files on mirrors and locally to include package versions for example.

December 7th 2007
We add a commits mailing list. This is a big help for reviewing commits and lots of bugs are caught this way.

Early January 2008
Our mascot Zebrapig is born.

January 31th 2008
We add src_prepare and src_configure phases to exheres-0. For many packages this helps us write much cleaner packages as it matches the stages of the build process much better than just having one big src_compile phase.

March 14th 2008
First draft of Exheres-for-smarties is committed. Exheres-for-smarties becomes our main technical document on the Exheres format and repository structure.

March 15th 2008
We add :* and := support to specify slot dependencies more precisely.

May 2008
We gain a new, much better default src_install implementation which was later followed up by revamping pretty much every default function as well as the various helper functions. We also switched from subversion to git and had the frst archived discussion of replacing categories - this is still a frequently discussed topic.

May 18th 2008
Announcing Exherbo on my blog
It took only an hour or two from my announcement being published to it hitting Slashdot, Digg and The Register to name but a few. The next several weeks was spend answering tons of questions and trying to resolve the worst misunderstandings.

May 23th 2008
We got tired of answering the same questions over and over so Ciaran wrote a quick install guide on http://ciaranm.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/installing-and-configuring-exherbo/. This is of historical interest only but it was important at the time as it allowed us to get back to development for the most part. It's also interesting as a fairly accurate description of the state of Exherbo back then.

June 4th 2008
FOSS Aalborg takes place and I open with a talk describing the main ideas behind Exherbo, some of the bigger issues we want to solve and why I chose to start a new Linux distribution instead of joining an existing distribution. Much interest shown and it was quite encouraging for myself to present my ideas before a large crowd of technical people. The video of my talk is still available at http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/blivklogere/foss_aalborg/2008/a_Linux_distribution_is_born--Bryan_Oestergaard--english--FOSS_Aalborg.mp4.

June 12th 2008
We add UnavailableRepository to Paludis and get a much better grip on the expanding number of package repositories. The script we use to build the package indexes for all the repositories hits Gentoo hard and we had to fiddle a bit with the updates before everybody was happy :)

August 17th 2008
My first "Exherbo goals" mail. This has become a series of mails where I describe the state of all the different ideas and features we're working on.

August 27th 2008
KDE 4.1.0 has landed! This marks the beginning of Exherbos KDE support and one of the more important milestones for desktop systems.

September 17th 2008
Markus Rothe announces his first PPC64 stage tarball. Markus ported Exherbo to PPC64 in fairly short time and is one of our many frequent contributors.

October 2nd 2008
Exherbo-cn, one of the early user managed repositories starts. It shows the strength of our distributed repository model by providing packages for Chinese support (fonts, input methods and so on). Exherbo-cn continues to be very active and one of the stronger parts of the community surrounding Exherbo.

October 4th 2008
The second day of the danish open source conference Open Source Days take place and I give a talk on my favorite subject - how we're rethinking Linux distributions and what it means to both developers and users. Unfortunately there's no video available of this talk.

Besides the talk we also had a fairly successful booth with plenty of visitors throughout the day. All in all a very good experience that I hope to repeat this year.

October 6th 2008
We add Unwritten repository support to Paludis and move all package requests from Bugzilla to unwritten so we can query them using paludis just like other packages.

January 26th 2009
Just in time for FOSDEM Ciaran adds AccountsRepository support to Paludis. Packages can now depend on users and groups just like they would depend on various libraries. We quickly proceed to kill enewuser and enewgroup usage.

February 7th 2009
I was invited to FOSDEM as a maintrack speaker and had a blast! I gave a talk on '10 cool things about Exherbo' where I presented some of the cool things we've done to improve the user and developer experience. The rest of the weekend I was constantly approached by people wanting to know more about Exherbo and it was definitely my best FOSDEM experience so far. Video from my talk is available at http://video.fosdem.org/2009/maintracks/.

February 11th 2009
I reorganised our website and changed the build infrastructure to make it easier to maintain. The new website makes it much easier to find needed information and just as importantly it makes it quite easy to contribute updates and new content.

February 14th 2009
First mention that I can find of Sydbox, our future sandbox implementation written by Ali Polatel.

February 12th 2009
We add parametrised exlibs. This is quickly used to specify supported autotools versions, perl module authors and a host of other things making many exlibs much cleaner.

February 15th 2009
We add src_test_slow() phase for those packages that takes a ridiculous time to run their testsuites, often measured in hours. Users can control this with a build_option.

March 2nd 2009
Jonathan Dahan grabbed the chance and wrote an install guide for Exherbo as well as a short FAQ. This is the first major piece of user contributed documentation to the website.

March 3rd 2009
First virtual machine images are published and becomes quite popular. The images are all built manually which convinces me to start writing a script to build them.

March 19th 2009
We replace versionator by internal functions. This way we can take advantage of Paludis own version comparison primitives instead of trying to keep a bash script in sync.

April 14th 2009
First release of Sydbox by Ali Polatel. Sydbox is intended to replace Gentoo's sandbox implementation in Exherbo and should fix most if not all the shortcomings of the existing sandbox implementation. This is an important example of core code being contributed to Exherbo from a user and shows that there's really no distance between users and developers in Exherbo.

May 10th 2009
I published my script for automatic KVM image creation. Several bugfixes and general clean up of the script is offered over the next few days.

Future expectations
Exherbo differs greatly from most other distributions and we don't really follow the normal pattern for distribution development. We have no release schedule for example - in fact we don't have any plans of a release at all!

That is not to say that a proper release might not happen but we'd need convincing arguments why a release is necessary before spending lots of time on it. So what do we do when we're not building new releases?

Small improvements
Well, most of our time is spend on what I consider small improvements. Much of the above list describe such improvements. Looked at individually they're interesting but rarely earth shattering. Based on this my predictions of what's to come is also going to be mostly about small but important things with a few bigger things thrown in as well.

Stable Exheres format
One of the most obvious things are the ever evolving Exheres format. At some point we're going to define our first stable format exheres-1 and convert our repositories to that. Before that happens I'd like to see proper support for binary packages and multi-ABI though.

Binary packages already works but we need to fix various problems before using it more officially. For multi-ABI we have the design more or less pinned down but there's some pretty annoying implementation issues that we need to work out.

Build infrastructure
We already have some parts of the infrastructure needed to build various Exherbo blobs like KVM images for example but lots more is needed.

Right now we can build KVM images for x86 and amd64 in a fairly inflexible manner. We need to expand current scripts and write new scripts allowing us to automatically build binary packages, several different kinds of image files, flexible configuration of partitions and file systems. And while at it we need to expand all this to be able to build images for CDs and USB sticks as well.

The build infrastructure should also be able to easily build customised images and be used for more or less unrelated purposes such as tinderboxing.

New init system
This is one of the more mysterious Exherbo projects but also one of the things that I'm most excited about personally. I've talked about it in public on several occasions so many of the basic ideas are already known. That said it's changed direction quite a bit and should be even more interesting when it's finally published.

Easier management of our distributed repository model
Our model of many Topic Repositories and Developer Repositories works fairly well as is but there's no doubt it can be improved further. Currently we want to implement a "repository of repositories" so you can install new repositories using paludis just like you install packages. As we continue to grow and refine our model I'm sure we're going to focus even more on this area and I'm looking forward to seeing what exciting ideas we're going to come up with in the future.

Better documentation
This is one area that haven't got a lot of focus so far. Our documentation mostly consists of Exheres-for-smarties and of course the paludis documentation. Lots of other areas needs to be documented and I'm hoping some users will step up to help with this important task.

Growing user community
This one seems obvious at first but a large part of our users come to Exherbo because of the flexibility of the distribution and our strong focus on technical design of new features as well as the rapid development happening. This also means that many of our users actively participate in the development which is something I'm hoping to strengthen further as we go along.

It keeps the community very much alive and we seem quite capable of keeping the focus and direction of Exherbo despite having twice as many users contributing in the past year as there are official Exherbo developers.

New profiles
Our current profiles aren't very flexible or useful. We have some vague idea of "mix-ins" allowing us to "mix" several different profiles like an amd64 profile + a KDE profile for example. The idea is fairly vague at this point but at some point we'll get much more flexible profiles allowing for easier maintenance and use.

The great unknown
And perhaps the most exciting part of the future is the part that we can't foresee at all. The development rate have only increased since announcing Exherbo and we often get ideas from unexpected sources. Some of these ideas don't fit in very well with Exherbo and are quickly discarded but many ideas are used in one way or another. Usually that requires some molding to make the idea fit the rest of Exherbo properly which in turn might lead to new ideas.

This process of constantly exploring new ideas helps keep Exherbo at the forefront and definitely keeps it a fun project to work on.

Thank you all for being part of this project - Exherbo might be my baby but you're all helping it grow up and shaping it into something very exciting.

KVM images

Sun, 10 May 2009 13:37:51 GMT

I've uploaded new KVM images based on the 20090504 stages a day or two ago. The images are available at http://dev.exherbo.org/images/ as usual.

But more interestingly I've now made the script used to build the images available so you can build new images yourself whenever you like. The script is available in the scripts/ directory of the exherbo repository.

All you need to build your own image is a few prerequisites and this script. The script requires kvm (for kvm-image) and parted (used to manipulate the partition table) and sfdisk (used to get some partition table information) installed.

"paludis --install kvm parted util-linux" will ensure you have all the needed prerequisites. After installing those all you need is to specify a few options to the script and everything should be automatic from there on.

The script describes the available options and their defaults when passed -h or --help.

# ./create-kvm-image --help
Usage: create-kvm-image [OPTIONS]
Options:
    --arch=amd64|x86                Target architecture for image file
    --kernelversion=            Kernel version to be used in image
    --stageversion=             Date of tarball, for example 20090504 or current
    --kvmtmpdir=/path/to/image      Where to build the image file. Defaults to /tmp/kvm-tmp/
    --kvmtmpkernel=/path/to/kernel Where to build the kernel. Defaults to /rootfs
    --kvmimagename=/path/to/image   Image filename (including path). Defaults to /exherbo-x86_64.img
    --kvmimagesize=          Size of image file in gigabytes. Defaults to 6G
    --jobs=                  Number of make jobs when building the kerne. Defaults to 4

If you're satisfied with the defaults all you need to specify are kernel version, stage tarball version and architecture. Which gives you a command like ./create-kvm-image --kernelversion=2.6.29.2 --stageversion=20090504 --arch=amd64

And a few minutes later (takes about 5 minutes on my quad-core Core2 box) you'll have a brand new KVM image called exherbo-x86_64.img in /tmp/kvm-tmp/. Please note that we don't support cross compiling yet so you'll have to specify the same target architecture as your host architecture for now.

And as always, I welcome git format-patches to add support for other image types (virtualbox, vmware, ..) and other features.

Repository naming

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:33:18 GMT

To avoid name clashes and silly names we're adding a new set of rules for naming repositories. The rules affect profiles/repo_name and not the actual sync url which can differ if neccessary. I'd recommend using the same name however.

The new rules for repo_name is as follows:
- Official topic repositories uses the topic as name.
- Personal repositories uses use the owners (nick)name
- Personal topic repositories use owners (nick)name-topic

So the official KDE repository is named 'kde' and you can find all it's packages using for example 'paludis --list-packages --repository kde'. Ingmars personal repository is named 'ingmar' and if he had a personal topic repository for office type packages it would be named 'ingmar-office'.

I hope the new rules will make the status of repositories easier to understand.