As part of the ongoing reorganization of the Solus distribution, in addition to moving to a more transparent management model concentrated in the hands of the community and independent of one person, the decision was announced to use technologies from the SerpentOS project, developed by the old team of developers of the Solus distribution, which include Aiki Doherty, in the development of Solus 5 (Ikey Doherty, creator of Solus) and Joshua Strobl (key developer of the Budgie desktop).
The SerpentOS distribution is not a fork from other projects and is based on its own moss package manager, which borrows many of the modern features developed in package managers such as eopkg/pisi, rpm, swupd and nix/guix, while maintaining the traditional view of package management and using the default build in stateless mode. The package manager uses the atomic system update model, which fixes the state of the root partition, and after the update, the state switches to the new one.
Deduplication based on hard links and shared cache is used to save disk space when storing multiple versions of packages. The contents of installed packages are located in the /os/store/installation/N directory, where N is the version number. The project also develops the moss-container container system, the moss-deps dependency management system, the boulder build system, the avalanche service encapsulation system, the vessel repository manager, the summit control panel, the moss-db database, and the bill reproducible bootstrap system.
Solus5 is expected to replace the build system (ypkg3 and solbuild) with boulder and avalanche, use the moss package manager instead of sol (eopkg), use the summit and GitHub development platforms instead of solhub, use vessel to manage repositories instead of ferryd. The distribution will continue to use the rolling model of package updates, following the principle of "install once, then always up-to-date through the installation of updates."
The SerpentOS developers have already helped raise the new infrastructure for Solus, and package updates are promised. It is planned to create a bootable image for developers with a GNOME-based environment. Once the moss-deps specific issues are resolved, GTK3 packaging will begin. In addition to the x86_64 architecture, it is planned to start generating assemblies for AArch64 and RISC-V in the future.
For now, the SerpentOS toolkit will be developed independently from the Solus development team. There is no talk of merging the Solus5 and SerpentOS projects yet - most likely, SerpentOS will develop as a distribution kit independent of Solus.
Source: opennet.ru