Is SerpentOS reproducible? How moss keep track of the installed packages?

[arthsmn]

I watched the way moss handles atomic updates and would like to know how it installs packages and creates the new /usr. Also, is the generated /usr reproducible? Can it be exported in a simple way?

[ermo]

I watched the way moss handles atomic updates and would like to know how it installs packages and creates the new /usr.

/.moss/root/ contains a series of directories. These directories are each a "hardlink farm" that can be independently used as /usr directories.

These "hardlink farms" are composed from cached, unpacked package directories that live in /.moss/assets/ (IIRC).

This also implies that we can garbage collect packages or assets that are no longer referenced. Currently, this process is manual and is done using the moss state prune command.

We have some plans for fleshing out this capability in the future.

Also, is the generated /usr reproducible? Can it be exported in a simple way?

With the upcoming system-model work, coupled with the upcoming 'versioned repository' work, each /usr transaction will be importable and exportable in a reproducible way, yes.

Currently, states are not reproducible, as they are each built from the previous state, and we don't yet offer versioned repositories that you can pin to.

[arthsmn]

Thanks for the explanation, really great design! Do you plan to allow inserting configurations inside the directories? It would be cool to easily package configurations, something à la NixOS.

[ermo]

Depends on the complexity and the outcomes of said complexity really.

The over-arching design goal is to enable a good "default configuration" of stuff, whilst being juuust flexible enough to allow local build profile overrides (-march=native -O3 -flto or w/e other flags ricers might try) and "rolling window" upgrade of toolchains via "slots", so that e.g. clang:18 and clang:19 can co-exist on a system, and one of them be chosen as the clang compiler for a given moss fstx root.

Serpent OS is not really intended to be a meta-distribution; those already exist and offer their own unique set of solutions for their chosen problem spaces.

[arthsmn]

Thanks for the clarifications! Looking forward to see how this project evolves!