kloeri announces Exherbo, another source based Linux distribution
Bryan Østergaard (aka kloeri) announced Exherbo today. He assembled a team of (ex-)Gentoo developers including Ciaran McCreesh (ciaranm), Richard Brown (rbrown), Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) and Alexander Færøy (eroyf) to build a new source based Linux distribution.
They would like to overcome some of the short-commings of Gentoo both from a technical as well as from a community perspective. Obviously this is easily said and hard to really achieve, so time will tell how successful that team can be. Renaming USE-Flags to OPTIONS and merging the platform KEYWORDS (like x86, ~x86) into the Options-logic is no big deal, but getting the thousands of ebuilds^Hpackages better supported and maintained than Gentoo will be the real deal{maker|breaker}.
Paludis, ciaranm's package manager, supports Gentoo ebuilds and can import them into Exherbo, so there is a potential migration path sketched out.*
They also add another init-system re-write ("Genesis") to the pool. An already quite crowded pool with rather shallow water, I may add.
Exherbo has nothing that is end-user-safe at the time of the announcement, so it's safe to assume kloeri's team wants to attract further development capacity 
.
Browse around the website or join folks in #exherbo if you're interested.
I asked in #exherbo what "exherbo" means ... latin for "uproot" was the answer. How fitting.
Updates
*19.04.08: Two friendly folks wrote in to clarify that Paludis currently can only import Ebuild-builds into Exherbo via importare, i.e. take a Gentoo build result and package it for importing into the Exherbo system through Paludis.
23.05.08: Ciaranm wrote a blog entry how to get build results into Exherbo/Paludis via importare.
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Ciaran McCreesh on :
Your importare comment doesn't really make sense -- importare is for installing hand-built things and things that need no build. There's no special migration path from Gentoo any more than there is one from Ubuntu or Fedora.
Daniel Lange on :
Thats why I said "Ebuild-builds ... i.e. take a Gentoo build result and package it for importing into the Exherbo system". Build-result = directory tree after src_install.
Ciaran McCreesh on :
I'm not even sure that that would work... Gentoo and Exherbo have a different base system, so generated binaries aren't in general transferable.
Daniel Lange on :
Works here with eroyf-exherbo-x86-2008-05-21.tar.bz2 and my (up-to-date) Gentoo install. But you're right, base systems need to be able to both fulfill the same dependencies (i.e. libs etc).