{"id":6266,"date":"2012-04-02T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T10:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unixmen.com\/?p=6266"},"modified":"2012-04-02T10:00:58","modified_gmt":"2012-04-02T10:00:58","slug":"interview-with-fabio-erculiani-of-sabayon-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/interview-with-fabio-erculiani-of-sabayon-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Fabio Erculiani of Sabayon Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fabio Erculiani is the founder and lead developer of the fantastic Sabayon Linux<\/a>. On this week’s interview, we talk with him about the details of the development, some technical details about “how things work” and the reasons that make Sabayon so unique. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tell us how you got involved with GNU\/Linux and why did you decide to create\u00a0Sabayon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve been involved in the FLOSS world at the age of 13. My first\u00a0distribution at the time was Redhat, followed by Mandrake and\u00a0Slackware some time later. However, in 2002 I discovered Gentoo and\u00a0it’s been true love since then. The philosophy of exposing all the\u00a0system internals directly to the user allowed me to learn infinite new\u00a0things every day at the time, and really helped me becoming what I am\u00a0today.<\/p>\n

Why did you choose Gentoo as the base for Sabayon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gentoo is a meta-distribution that you can bend and shape to your\u00a0likes. Bringing Gentoo to the masses has always been my dream, making\u00a0it simple is what Sabayon tries to do everyday. You can see it as a\u00a0layer on top of Gentoo that handles the hard part for you.<\/p>\n

Do you have any kind of collaboration with the Gentoo developers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am a Gentoo developer since 2009 and I am also contributing to some\u00a0Gentoo projects and maintaining several ebuilds in the Portage tree.<\/p>\n

So, Sabayon tries to be a more\u00a0user-friendly way to get the power of\u00a0Gentoo which is suitable for advanced users only<\/strong>. Can a complete linux noob use and maintain Sabayon\u00a0succesfully?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’re “draining” users from both Arch and Ubuntu, so I guess several\u00a0people find Sabayon the next step after childhood (Ubuntuhood) because\u00a0they just want more control and less commercial\/political garbage over\u00a0their system.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of rolling release distributions out there, what makes\u00a0Sabayon unique?<\/strong><\/p>\n

All the rolling distros I tried were lacking proper packaging, I mean,\u00a0with Sabayon you can use both Portage (which is the most powerful\u00a0source-based package manager out there) and Entropy (which is our\u00a0binary Package Manager that works on top of the Gentoo Base System).
\nTell me another distro that has all those things perfectly working\u00a0together without annoying the (advanced) user. Moreover, if you look\u00a0at Arch binary packages, you will realize how ill their dependencies\u00a0are: it reminds me the well known rpm dependency hell problem.<\/p>\n

We spend a lot of time in Sabayon trying to find a good balance\u00a0between split packages and fat binary blobs.\u00a0We also spent the last 3-4 years working on next gen Binary Package\u00a0Management applications and you’re going to see the outcome of this\u00a0effort starting from the next month: we’re about to launch a new\u00a0“Google-like” Applications Management UI, its name is Rigo<\/a> and you can\u00a0find more info about it on my personal blog.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How hard is it to balance stability and frequent updates on a distro that\u00a0offers 5 different desktop environments? What is the contribution of Entropy\u00a0Matter on this task?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s actually very hard. But it’s just a learning process, we define\u00a0upgrade paths, we test them in experimental repositories and collect\u00a0feedback that is back used to define the aforementioned upgrade paths.\u00a0It’s a non-stop process that made possible to automate several tasks\u00a0typical of a rolling distro: continous package bumps. This is how\u00a0Matter works, in layman terms: upstream Gentoo push new ebuilds to\u00a0Portage, Matter scans for these weekly by pulling a new Portage tree\u00a0checkout and compiles them (the ebuilds bump selection happens through\u00a0.spec files, which contain a list of packages that can be\u00a0automatically compiled if certain criteria are met).\u00a0However, critical packages or big bumps are still manually handled\u00a0(for eg. KDE, toolchain, kernel).<\/p>\n

Why do you use the word extreme to characterize various aspects of Sabayon\u00a0Linux? Extreme gaming, extreme browsing, extreme work, extreme development,\u00a0extreme-rolling are just some examples found on your website. What is so\u00a0extreme about Sabayon, and why is it good for an operating system to be\u00a0\u201cextreme\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have to try it for a few weeks in order to fully realize what this\u00a0“extreme” thing is. We offer many ~0-day packages (meaning that we\u00a0offer them the same, or next, day they’re released by upstream) but we\u00a0do that in a way that enthusiasts have them first. All our new\u00a0packages go through 3 stages, in order: hell, limbo, mainline. Matter\u00a0pushes packages to our “hell” repository from where we manually review\u00a0them and move to “limbo”. Once in limbo, packages are available for\u00a0public consumption and sit there for a week (95% of the bugs are found\u00a0at this stage). After a week, the limbo repository is spilled into the\u00a0mainline repository.
\nStarting from Sabayon 7, the mainline repository is weekly snapshotted\u00a0into a repository called “sabayon-weekly”, which is the default\u00a0mainline repository nowadays. This way, users wanting super stability\u00a0have it out of the box, while those wanting a full rolling experience\u00a0can easily move “back” to more aggressive repositories. The idea comes\u00a0from the fact that newbies are less inclined to changing critical\u00a0settings like these, resulting in a better and stabler experience,\u00a0which is a win-win.<\/p>\n

How many people are involved in the development of Sabayon Linux? What is\u00a0the level of community contribution?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think we’re 5-6 core developers, including me, and a lot of external\u00a0contributors (submitting bugs via Bugzilla, answering to forum posts,\u00a0and so forth). The most important thing is that we’re all having fun.\u00a0I wouldn’t continue working on Sabayon without the “fun” part.<\/p>\n

Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, E17. What do you choose to use and\u00a0why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am currently using GNOME 3 in Shell mode, but I find it quite buggy\u00a0and braindamaged (or braindamaging? ;-)).\u00a0I hope XFCE will move to Gtk3 (which I love) soon though.<\/p>\n

What future plans are there for Sabayon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You will see a lot of new stuff in the coming months, starting from Rigo.<\/p>\n

Thanks Fabio! See you everyone next Monday with another interesting interview<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fabio Erculiani is the founder and lead developer of the fantastic Sabayon Linux. On this week’s interview, we talk with him about the details of the development, some technical details about “how things work” and the reasons that make Sabayon so unique. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2952,"featured_media":6332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[906,1588],"class_list":["post-6266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-interview","tag-sabayon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2952"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unixmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}