Despite a brief excursion out of the country for a first-in-a-lifetime holiday, I’m happily back at the desk to bring you up to date with the latest goings in Serpent OS. TLDR: Loads of awesome, baremetal is enabled, ISO cycle in next couple of weeks.
OK, we all know you want to know about the baremetal stuff, but c’mon, check out this changeset!
This update came a little later in the month, as we’ve got a lot of exciting news to share. Everything from boulder in Rust, to the GNOME 45 Desktop complete with moss triggers built atop a rebootstrapped toolchain.
We’re pleased to announce that over the course of this weekend, once testing has completed we’ll deploy the latest version of boulder, our packaging build tool. This has been given the Rust treatment, directly sharing the codebase with moss.
Unlike our PoC implementation, the new boulder makes use of the clone syscall to execute portions of itself under user namespaces, eliminating a longstanding deployment irritation of having the main build binary inside packaging.
Just like moss it makes use of tokio for async right where we need it, and is rootless to make life easier for our contributors. Far from being just a direct port of the proof of concept, it adds new tools to empower developers, such as breakpoints in packaging recipes.
Precisely one month since our end of year summary, so, what have we been up to? With a new year, a new start was long overdue. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve finally shifted our butts over to our own server (again).
While this isn’t quite as chunky a news update as the last post, we rather hope you appreciate the regularity of the news.
‘tarkah’ has been tirelessly porting moss-service, the core foundation of our automated build system, to a shiny new Rust codebase. While we don’t have an immediately pressing need for the port to come online, it will certainly address some “v1 issues” and ensure the best-in-class development experience for our contributors.
In our pursuit for a sustainable, community oriented project, we’ve been doing a lot of in house organisation. Very importantly, we’ve now relicensed our packaging recipes to MPL-2.0, bringing them in line with the license chosen for our current engineering efforts (moss, etc).
To reiterate a critical point, we require that our contributions are attributed to the virtual collective “Serpent OS Developers” to ensure we’re unable to relicense any contributions without express consent of the contributors involved.
Additionally we picked MPL-2.0 over Zlib due to some distinct advantages in relation to patent trolls. In combination we believe both the project and our users will have the greatest protection from patent trolls and fiscally-motivated relicensing.
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)!
Firstly, a quote from Cory:
I’ve been a long time Solus user and was very excited about what serpent os was doing. Really got invested once I started diving into the D code and seeing how powerful the tools and ideas were. The Rust rewrite was just a perfect storm for me with my experience there and my desire to make contributions. Getting to know you and ermo has just been icing on the cake, you’ve both been so welcoming and friendly. So lots of fun times.
On the personal side, I’m on the west coast in the States, have a lovely wife, just had a baby girl and am enjoying my time with fatherhood and coding
Chances are you know tarkah for his contributions to iced-rs, and to Solus. His contributions to the moss-rs project have been absolutely critical, and his patience essential as we got ourselves quickly up to speed with Rust. It is entirely fair to say that our Rust efforts would not have been possible without him!
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.
