June 2025 project status update

[ermo]

Hi Everyone,

This post explains what is going on for those of you waiting for new updates to land in the packages.aerynos.com repository.

TL;DR: We have some good news for you.

Background

At the end of March this year, our existing DLang build infrastructure that we use to build and deliver packages to users, had begun showing signs of instability.

This prompted us to begin the task of porting the code to Rust, with tarkah and ermo driving the rewrite.

During the months of April and May, this rewrite was top priority inside AerynOS, and somewhere around the middle of May, the old Proof of Concept DLang infra stopped working completely, after we had carefully tried to land a few new packages to the main branch of the recipes repository.

Current Status

This meant that we had no choice but to focus fully on getting the new Rust infra production ready. Consequently, ermo developed the necessary scripting to set up a distributed build cluster at his home, and began testing it by building existing recipes to see how well things worked.

Any bugs encountered during these runs were fed back to tarkah for analysis and fixes. This resulted in rapid progress, where we managed to build more and more recipes per clean start run and began fixing recipes that didn't actually build in the process as well.

Once we were sufficiently confident that things were heading in the right direction, Reilly and ermo began planning what it would take to put this new infra in production. This in turn involved reviewing and landing a lot of PRs that had been left to rot in our various PR queues.

In the end, the result is that we have now rebuilt our entire recipe repo twice in the process, using the new infra, upgraded moss and boulder os-tools, and new toolchains and build system updates.

All said, we have put between 2500 and 3000 recipe (re-)builds through the new infra.

Remaining Tasks

The plan is to sync the packages we have built on ermo's private, temporary infratest build cluster to packages.aerynos.com in the near future.

We are still investigating an annoying issue that will sometimes make our build queue appear stuck, and we are hesitant to formally put the new Rust infra code in production on our public server before this issue is resolved.

Stay tuned for updates. 🚀

[ermo]

Just a quick update:

While doing (what we thought would be the final) upgrade testing, we ran into an issue where our moss package manager would neglect to update gstreamer. This is proving to be quite the rabbithole, and will likely require actual code updates to moss, which then need to be deployed to user systems.

This means that our plans to sync updates from the rebuild repository are currently put on hold, until we figure out a solution that won't brick existing installs.

[NomadicCore]

We have a fix for the moss bug that is currently going through code review.

AerynOS/os-tools#514

We also need to test it to make sure it doesn't introduce any new / unintended bugs.

Once tested (and adjusted if required), this will unblock this aspect of being able to sync updates from the rebuild repo

[Jeyso215]

[jplatte]

Speaking only for myself as an individual contributor: Hell no.
Its author is spreading conspiracy theories about corporations trying to kill X11, and worse.

[ermo]

Will you add X11Libre?: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Very unlikely.

[ermo]

As a follow-up to this answer, it is worth noting that the Xorg developers have abandoned Xorg because it was literally unmaintainable and a security nightmare.

This is not to say that we are not sympathetic to people who have a workflow that does not yet work on any Wayland compositors in production.

We are hoping that, in time, we will instead be able to provide the wayback compatibility shim for people whose workflow only works on X11.

Assuming no SNAFUs, wayback appears likely to yield a much nicer maintainer story that meshes much better with how the rest of the Wayland ecosystem is developed and delivered.