As part of the ongoing reorganization of the Solus distribution, in addition to transitioning to a more transparent management model focused on the community and independent of a single person, it has been announced that the development of Solus 5 will utilize technologies from the SerpentOS project, which is being developed by the old team of the Solus distribution, including Ikey Doherty (creator of Solus) and Joshua Strobl (key developer of the Budgie desktop).
The SerpentOS distribution is not a fork of other projects and is based on its own package manager, moss, which borrows many modern features developed in package managers like eopkg/pisi, rpm, swupd, and nix/guix, while maintaining a traditional approach to package management and using stateless mode by default. The package manager uses an atomic system update model, where the state of the root partition is fixed, and after an update, the state switches to the new one.
To save disk space when storing multiple versions of packages, deduplication using hard links and a shared cache is applied. The contents of installed packages are placed in the directory /os/store/installation/N, where N is the version number. The project is also developing the moss-container system for containers, the moss-deps dependency management system, the boulder build system, the avalanche service encapsulation system, the vessel repository manager, control panel the moss-db database, and the bill reproducible bootstrapping system.
In Solus5, it is expected that the build system (ypkg3 and solbuild) will be replaced with boulder and avalanche, the moss package manager will be used instead of sol (eopkg), the summit development platforms and GitHub will replace solhub, and vessel will be used for repository management instead of ferryd. The distribution will continue to utilize a rolling update model for packages, adhering to the principle of 'installed once, kept current through updates.'
The developers of SerpentOS have already helped set up a new infrastructure for Solus, with package updates promised. A bootable image for developers using a GNOME-based environment is planned. Once specific issues with moss-deps are resolved, packaging for GTK3 will commence. In addition to the x86_64 architecture, builds for AArch64 and RISC-V are planned for the future.
Currently, the SerpentOS toolkit will be developed independently from the Solus development team. There are no discussions about merging the Solus5 and SerpentOS projects at the moment — SerpentOS is likely to develop as a distribution independent from Solus.
Source: opennet.ru
