Wulf's Blog

It has been quite a while since I last wrote something about my work on systemd in Exherbo, so here’s an update: What has been accomplished so far: The Exherbo patches are done. Do NOT try to submit them upstream yet, though. I’ll take care of that when the time is ripe. Lots of services are done. You can boot and run most systems using systemd now. I’ve built new amd64 and x86 stages without any init system so you can start out without the baselayout-1/sysvinit cruft. The installation guide has been updated. Every systemd service is implemented natively and we’re not using anything from baselayout-1 or sysvinit anymore. Instead, all the important stuff has been moved to skeleton-filesystem-layout. systemd’s dependencies have been updated accordingly. Thus, for people using systemd, baselayout-1 and sysvinit are now obsolete. YAY! What still needs to be done: Improve existing service definitions for systemd. Create socket definitions for several of the existing service definitions. (And new ones, of course.) Create systemd service files for missing services. Rules for new service files: Please make sure they’re implemented natively. I won’t accept non-native service files unless you can convince me there’s definitely no other solution. If you…

As you may have noticed, I’ve recently added systemd to ::philantrop for use in Exherbo. I’m writing this to warn you that I will break systemd (and consequently your boot process) until further notice recklessly, repeatedly and without prior warning to anyone make clear what I intend to do with systemd in Exherbo make a plan for myself. What I want to do first is get a feeling for systemd and see if it might have the potential to replace baselayout-1 (bl-1) and, at least for myself, be used instead of the init-system-that-is-not-to-be. 😉 As I really want to replace bl-1, I’m not going to go the Gentoo way of simply adding a handful of pseudo-units that essentially just call the openrc init scripts. If you want that, you’re on your own and I won’t accept patches that do that. Instead, I’m aiming for: a full native set of systemd units not tainted by anything else a minimal set of non-native configuration files (what we currently have in /etc/conf.d; I don’t think it will be possible to avoid them completely but I will if I can) staying as near to upstream as possible and I’ll try to submit my patches…

Exherbo has developed nicely since we went public about it two years ago and even though we haven’t yet accomplished all of our major goals yet, I think we’re doing well. In this post, I’d like to comment on a few things that we’ve accomplished, some we’re still working on and some which we yet have to deal with. This is, of course, just my personal point of view and not necessarily shared by any other Exherbo developer. I’m writing this in the hope that some of you might want to help with the open issues and to remind myself of what we did and what we have yet to do. 🙂 Distributed development I really like how we do distributed development: Our contributors just add their git format-patch to our patch-tracking bot hacchi, we’ll review the patch and if it meets our quality standards, we can just apply it locally and push it. If the patch needs improvements, we point those out to the submitter. Like that, we’re not only getting quality exheres but we help our contributors to learn good practices (which often can be applied to non-Exherbo shell scripting as well). Not only do Exherbo core devs…

In an unexpected move, the Gentoo trustees have contacted us, Exherbo, recently with a suggestion. Disappointed with the intense internal quarreling among Gentoo developers (which Gentoo has been famous for anyway), the general inability of the current Gentoo council to provide the necessary vision and strategic governance for Gentoo as a whole as well as the lack of implementation of newer EAPIs in Portage, the trustees deemed it necessary to step in. Gentoo Foundation, Inc.’s president, Roy “NeddySeagoon” Bamford being a regular in our IRC channel #exherbo on Freenode discussed the current state of Gentoo with his most trusted advisors, Denis “Calchan” Dupeyron (already an active Exherbo contributor) and Thomas “tanderson” Anderson (Exherbo dev). All three of them had first-hand experience with Exherbo and the way we work – distributedly, with strong peer-review and almost every single user contributing to Exherbo. This effectiveness, the overall quality of Exherbo as well as the fast-paced development of both our exheres-0 format, the amazing speed of Paludis development (Paludis being Exherbo’s package manager) and, last but not least, Ciaran McCreesh’s latest information about the move to cave and egress, a Portage-UI-compatible Paludis client, convinced them to boldly go on with their plan to…

What keeps me doing things in my life are primarily two factors: Money and recognition. Not necessarily in that order. In my job, I’m being paid to do what I do but I couldn’t ever be satisfied with just that. What really thrills me is being recognised for the professional I am. Receiving an email from a customer that simply said “Thank you. You’re one of the few persons I can always rely on.” made my day. I don’t get that from receiving my pay-cheque. In my private life, I’m mostly a father, a husband and, last but not least, a guy who loves to work on Linux. A machine that just works is a boring machine. Thus, I really love working on Exherbo. Working on Exherbo allows me to do and try everything, make things work exactly the way I want them to, give back to the FOSS community – and being recognised for the professional I am. 🙂 Recognition, thus, is very important for me. Now, Bryan “kloeri” Østergaard, has decided to remove Exherbo’s “Developers” page which lists all the core developers in favour of a simple list of all contributors ever. This in itself is fine with me….