Lies, damn lies and statistics…
At the time of writing (Wed Feb 11 11:22:48 CET 2009), the following numbers might be of interest:
- 269 days since official announcement
- 30 official package repositories
- 7 unofficial package repositories
- 1313 packages in official repositories
- 76 packages in unofficial repositories
- 20 developers
- 20 contributors to official repositories
- 90 people in #exherbo
- 50 kicks & 27 current bans in #exherbo
- 3 platforms (x86, amd64, ppc64 [unofficial])
- Activity in 12 official repositories over the last 24 hours
- 6896 commits in official repositories ~ 56 minutes between commits
- 31 open bugs / 120 closed bugs
- 1174 quips
- 1 supported PM
- 1 (unwanted) slashdotting
- 0 flamewars
- 1 awesome mascot
- 1 deleted wikipedia article
- 3 talks (only 1 video)
- >9000 people pissed off by our honesty
- Too many offers of community management/PR/HR help
We’ve been working on Exherbo for longer than that but serious work on packages and “userspace” stuff began around the time of the announcement.
This includes individual developers’ supplemental repositories. Thanks to Paludis’ excellent support for multiple repositories and in particular the unavailable repository type, keeping track of packages in 30 different repositories is easy as an end-user (my laptop/server currently uses 16 of those repositories). Does any other distribution make it as easy to keep track of many small end-user oriented repositories? The Debian/Apt approach is definitely more painful than this.
These are repositories belonging to Exherbo users rather than official developers. The difference between these and the official ones is that these aren’t hosted on Exherbo infrastructure and they’re listed in unavailable-unofficial rather than unavailable.
Believe it or not but chances are you will find most of what you need here. There’s a long way to the tens of thousands of packages in distributions such as Gentoo and Debian but we don’t really have to go there. Adding packages with importare is easy and there are whole groups of packages that doesn’t really have to be hosted in official repositories. If a group of people want to add robotics-related packages to Exherbo they can just create an unofficial repository (could be anything, $scm repo, tarball, rsync) and get it listed in unavailable-unofficial. We really want to keep the number of packages we have to maintain low to allow us to spend time developing the system and its related tools. Maintaining packages doesn’t require any magic cloaks.
This isn’t a lot, in part because some people prefer to provide packages as patches for official repositories but mainly because Exherbo is just now crawling out of its infancy, taking its first steps towards being used by a wider audience. As this audience grows, we expect the number of unofficial packages to grow as well.
Unofficial is actually a somewhat misleading term. It’s true that we don’t maintain them, but we do glance over the repositories before they are added to unavailable and if we hear of major breakages from these we can quite easily remove them again. Most (if not all) of the people with unofficial repositories listed in unavailable tend to hang around in #exherbo on IRC, so submitting patches to them is simple.
As currently listed on the wobsite. You will notice this number has been near-constant over the last year (I think one developer joined since the announcement). There’s no real reason to let this number grow at the moment, since all package maintenance can be done without push-access to the official repositories.
Over the last year, patches from 20 people against the official repositories have been accepted and pushed. Several packages are currently maintained by non-developers. Switching to Git early on was a great decision since it makes the whole patch-dance incredibly easy. We owe a great deal of thanks to these people.
This is also one of the near-constant numbers. A majority of these people idles in the channel, but if you ping a developer with a link to a git format-patch, it’s likely to get pushed or rejected with suggestions for improvements quickly. Keep in mind that most Exherbo developers lives in Europe and some of us (usually not Ingmar) also sleep every now and then.
Given the potential for flames and the number of assholes on the internets these numbers seem fairly low. It’s usually a peaceful channel.
Exherbo currently has stages for three different platforms though not all packages has been tested on all platforms. Paludis will refuse to install untested packages and mark them as ‘Masked by platform’. Feel free to submit a git format-patch if you find that a masked package works well on your platform (you can override the platform mask in /etc/paludis/platforms.conf).
Even though it’s been nine months since the initial announcement we’re still doing lots of work all over the place.
The most important number of them all!!! This comes from ohloh and is a little more than a day old. It’s not too bad for forty people working on this project in their spare-time.
We usually only use bugzilla when we need to keep track of issues for an extended period of time. Most issues are quickly resolved over IRC.
If you file a bug, remember to attach a git format-patch!
Don’t say we’re not funny! If you know a bit about Gentoo, you should recognise many of the quoted people.
No-one has stepped up to provide an alternative implementation of the exheres-0 EAPI, written in Haskell. Patches are welcome (in /dev/null, that is).
That certainly turned what should’ve been a low-key announcement in a few relevant places into a lot more attention than what we wanted (or was prepared to recieve at that point in time). Still, it was a fun couple of days.
That’s right. It’s hard to start a serious flamewar among 20 people.
Someone wrote a wikipedia article just after the announcement, which was swiftly deleted as Exherbo didn’t meet the notability guidelines for wikipedia back then. Since wikipedia is all about verifiable, third-party information it will probably take a while before we’ll meet that requirement. But that’s all for the better – the people browsing wikipedia in search of their next distribution probably aren’t the kind of people we need/want right now.
Bryan gave the talk on Genesis at FOSS Aalborg. It was this talk that prompted the announcement of Exherbo, and at the moment, this is the only talk we have a video from.
Bryan then gave a talk about the visions and long-term goals of Exherbo last October at Open Source Days. This talk was a lot more interesting in general but unfortunately no video recording has been made available so far.
Lastly, Bryan was invited to talk at FOSDEM four days ago. The video isn’t out yet, but it probably will be soon.
For some reason a lot of people felt offended by the fact that we didn’t want them to waste their time on a half-working, most-likely-broken distribution. If you tell them to use it, they will complain that it’s broken. If you tell them not to, they will complain that you’re an arrogant bastard. Even so, scaring these people away was a lot better the wasting time on supporting them. We’re reaching a point where we feel Exherbo is usable by a wider audience, but we certainly weren’t there nine months ago. If you look a the frontpage you will see that its content was changed a short while ago, to better reflect the current state of Exherbo.
We still don’t need that thankyouverymuch!
That’s what I could think of at the moment. Are there any other interesting Exherbo-related numbers out there?
Thanks for doing the numbers. I often get questions like these and it’s nice being able to point at some real numbers instead of just guessing at them.
It’s also quite interesting seeing how many commits we’ve made in such a short time. I’ve always had a feeling that development was progressing very quickly and the numbers certainly verifies that feeling.