This Week in Solus -- Install #30

July 5, 2016

Welcome to the 30th installation of This Week in Solus, or as I prefer to call this one, the Hackfest 1.2.1 roundup.

Hackfest 1.2.1

Last weekend, Ikey and I worked with the community on addressing items for Solus 1.2.1, in addition to closing a multitude of bugs and landing patches from the community.

Videos
Summary

A lot was accomplished over the course of those two days, such as:

eopkg is dead, long live sol

Immediately following the delivery of Solus 1.2.1, Solus 2.0 will enter active development. The first change in this series of developments will be the removal of eopkg, which will be re-implemented in C as sol. The implementation will be specifically tailored to take advantage of modern CPU features, enabling an optimized package manager that will form the core of Solus 2, enabling a far lighter disk profile for the core of the operating system.

sol will eliminate the need for comar, a remnant from the fork of PiSi to eopkg, and inherit views towards transactional usage and global Solus philosophy such as being stateless. We’ll add support for post-installs but they’ll be used sparingly, and where possible sol will pick up the bits it needs to.

C No Evil

Screenshot From 2016 07 05 23 51 45

Budgie at its core has long been written in Vala, with parts of the environment (such as the Applet plugin API) being written in C. But as we look towards improving performance, ensuring a firmer control on memory management and security, and better defining an ABI, we have come to one, simple conclusion: In order to address our concerns and fit our needs, we need to (re-)write the core in C.

What does this mean for third-parties shipping Budgie applets? You can continue to develop applets in the same fashion: leveraging C, python, and Vala, and effortlessly these applets will be more responsive under our C-based core.