We're nearing the end of February and there's plenty of good news to share.
First and foremost, Ikey has completed his long-anticipated and hoped-for move. The recently built new place has a gigabit fibre connection installed, good insulation, and a heat pump, which should make it cheaper to heat than his previous home during the cold season. It's also situated in a quiet rural neighbourhood, which means the potential for unwanted interruptions and distractions has already gone down considerably compared to before.
After the move, Ikey has made good headway with his serpent toolchain cleanup work, which has not only focused on updating the packages, but is also focusing on splitting out common dependencies into small sub-packages, which will lead to smaller downloads and smaller installed system sizes.
Tarkah has been quietly plugging away at the new boulder-rs and just a day or two ago, he announced that in his estimation, boulder-rs is now at feature parity with the legacy boulder-d code base, including ELF object scanning. Once Ikey gets a chance to review tarkah's PR, it will land and replace the current boulder-d solution.
Philipp has been working with Fabio on bringing up the libstone-go library, ensuring that the serpent moss binary archive format can now be read and manipulated from Rust, Go and DLang.
In the mean time, next to my efforts related to driving the Solus eopkg migration from python2 to python3, I have been working on some background Serpent project admin stuff, including ensuring that Ikey can trivially deploy tooling updates to our builders. In addition, I have been working with tarkah on UX/DX features in his boulder-rs work.
The next step for the team is to get the oxide-alpha1 targets captured in a milestone, so we will be able to attack the various issues in parallel via well-defined goals. If you're wondering what the oxide-alph1 target is, it is essentially the (yet-to-be-defined) steps related to delivering a minimally usable daily driver* for Ikey from which he can use the Rust-based moss-rs and boulder-rs tooling to build and install packages.
Stay tuned for more updates!
*: Note that the oxide-alpha1 target will not be intended for use by the general public, as it will be a developer-only "engineering sample" with a lot of rough edges and unknown bugs. The goal is for Ikey to hit these bugs in his daily workflow and begin fixing them.