Burning question - how long before we can use Serpent OS on our development systems? It's a fair question - and one that requires context to answer. Let's start our new monthly update cycle with a recap of progress so far.
We'd like to extend a huge official welcome, and thank you, to newest team member Cory Forsstrom (aka tarkah)!
Allow me to start this post by stating something very important to me: I absolutely love the D programming language, along with the expressivity and creative freedom it brings. Therefore please do not interpret this post as an assassination piece.
For a number of months now the Serpent OS project has stood rather still. While this could naively be attributed to our shared plans with Solus - a deeper, technical issue is to be acredited.
Again, allow me to say I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience with D over the last 3 or so years, it has been truly illuminating for me as an engineer. With that said, we have also become responsible for an awful lot of code. As an engineering-led distribution + tooling project, our focus is that of secure and auditable code paths. To that extent we pursued DIP1000 as far as practical and admit it has a way to go before addressing our immediate needs of memory safety.
While we're quite happy to be an upstream for Linux distributions by way of release channels and tooling releases, we don't quite have the resources to also be an upstream for the numerous D packages we'd need to create and maintain to get our works over the finish line.
With that said, I will still continue to use D in my own personal projects, and firmly believe that one day D will realise its true potential.
Our priorities have shifted somewhat since the announcement of our shared venture with Solus, and we must make architectural decisions based on the needs of all stakeholders involved, including the existing contributor pool. Additionally, care should be taken to be somewhat populist in our choice of stacks in order to give contributors industry-relevant experience to add to their résumé (CV).
Typically Solus has been a Golang-oriented project, and has a number of experienced developers. With the addition of the Serpent developers, the total cross-over development team has a skill pool featuring Rust and Go, as well as various web stack technologies.
Reconsidering the total project architecture including our automated builds, the following decisions have been made that incorporate the requirements of being widely adopted/supported, robust ecosystems and established tooling:
moss, boulder, libstoneThe new infrastructure will be brought up using widely available modules, and designed to be scalable from the outset as part of a Kubernetes deployment, with as minimal user interaction as needed. Our eventual plans include rebuilding the entire distribution from source with heavy caching once some part of the dependency graph changes.
This infrastructure will then be extended to support the Solus 4 series for quality of life improvements to Solus developers, enabling a more streamlined dev workflow: TL;DR less time babysitting builds = more Serpent development focus.
Our priority these past few days has been on the new moss-rs repository where we
have begun to reimplement moss in Rust. So far we have a skeleton CLI powered by clap with an in-progress library for reading
.stone archives, our custom package format.
The project is organised as a Rust workspace, with the view that stone, moss and boulder will all live in the same tree.
Our hope is this vastly improves the onboarding experience and opens the doors (finally) to contributors.
It should also be noted that the new tooling is made available under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL-2.0). After internal discussion, we felt the MPL offered the greatest level of defence against patent trolls while still ensuring our code was widely free for all to respectfully use and adapt.
Please also note that we have always, and continue to deliberately credit copyright as:
Copyright © 2020-2023 Serpent OS Developers
This is a virtual collective consisting of all whom have contributed to Serpent OS (per git logs) and is designed to prevent us from being able to change the license down the line, i.e. a community protective measure.
Despite some sadness in the change of circumstances, we must make decisions that benefit us collectively as a community.
Please join us in raising a virtual glass to new pastures, and a brave new blazing fast 🚀 (TM) future for Serpent OS and Solus 5.
Cheers!
We had intended to get a blog post out a little bit quicker, but the last month has been extremely action packed. However, it has paid off immensely. As our friends at Solus recently announced it is time to embark on a new voyage.
There is very little point in rehashing the post, so I'll cover the essentials
Oh no, no. The most practical angle to view this from is that Serpent OS is free to build and innovate to create the basis of Solus 5. Outside of the distribution we're still keen to continue development on our tooling and strategies.
It is therefore critical that we continue development, and find the best approach for both projects, to make the transition to Solus 5 as seamless as possible. To that end we will still need to produce ISOs and have an active community of users and testers. During this transition period, despite being two separate projects, we're both heading to a common goal and interest.
We have an exciting journey ahead for all of us, and there are many moving parts involved. Until we're at the point of mutual merge, we will keep the entities and billing separate. Thus, funds to the Solus OpenCollective are intended for use within Solus, whereas we currently use GitHub Sponsors for our own project needs.
Currently Solus and Serpent OS share one server, which was essential for quick turnaround on infrastructure enabling. At the end of this month Serpent OS will migrate from that server to a new, separate system, ensuring the projects are billed separately.
Long story short, if you wish to sponsor Serpent OS specifically, please do so via our GitHub sponsors account as our monthly running costs will immediately rise at the end of this month. If you're supporting Solus development, please do visit them and sponsor them =)
Glad you asked! Now that the dust is settling, we're focusing on Serpent OS requirements, and helping Solus where we can. Our immediate goals are to build a dogfooding system for a small collection of developers to run as an unsupported prealpha configuration, allowing us to flesh out the tooling and processes.
This will include a live booting GNOME ISO, and sufficient base packages to freely iterate on moss, boulder, etc as well
as our own infrastructure. Once we've attained a basic quality and have an installer option, those ISOs will be made available
to you guys!
After many months and much work, our infrastructure is finally online. We've had a few restarts, but it's now running fully online with 2 builders, ready to serve builds around the clock.
Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the delay since our last blog post. We made the decision to move this website to static content, which took longer than expected. We're still using our own D codebase, but prebuilding the site (and fake "API") so we can lower the load on our web server.
Our infrastructure is composed of 3 main components.
This is the page you can see over at dash.serpentos.com. It contains the build scheduler. It monitors our git repositories, and as soon as it discovers any missing builds it creates build tasks for them. It uses a graph to ensure parallel builds happen as much as possible, and correctly orders (and blocks) builds based on build dependencies.
We have 2 instances of Avalanche, our builder tool, running. This accepts configuration + build requests from Summit, reporting status and available builds.
This is an internal repository manager, which accepts completed packages from an Avalanche instance. Published packages land at dev.serpentos.com
Super early days with the infra but we now have builds flowing as part of our continuous delivery solution. Keeping this blog post short and sweet... we're about to package GNOME and start racing towards our first real ISOs!
If you like what the project is doing, don't forget to sponsor!