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eopkg is dead, long live eopkg

· 2 min read
David Harder
David Harder
Solus Staff

Close watchers of our packages repository may have noticed some strange looking items:

It's a long story.

Our package manager eopkg is written in Python2. Python2 was originally planned to hit end-of-life all the way back in 2015! So Solus contributors past and present have wrestled with three thorny issues:

  • Do we really want to just port eopkg to python3? Surely we could build something newer and shinier.
  • How exactly do we want to port eopkg to Python3? (We'll call this ported version eopkg3 for short)
  • How do we make sure eopkg3 works even if something goes wrong with the Python3 libraries on someone's machine?

Here's the plan to solve this: Ikey and friends over at Serpent OS are actively building a new package manager moss that we are excited about. And they're building it with Solus in mind as an eventual user. This will be our fix for the first problem. In the meantime, we're taking a pragmatic approach to the last two issues so that (frankly) we can do more exciting things.

Sheepman, Livingsilver, and others completed a direct Python3 port, which we never expect our users to actually run directly like a traditional Python program. Instead, that port will be compiled into a binary using nuitka. We're calling this compiled eopkg3 binary eopkg4-bin for now. Critically, this binary will have no dependencies other than libc. If we can successfully swap eopkg with eopkg4-bin on user's machines, then we've solved the last issue: Python3 can be updated without worrying about also wrecking the package manager. Got it?

But what about Python2? Well, now that Evan and Joey have seen off a successful ISO release with a calamares based installer, we can cross os-installer off the list. And eopkg4-bin will let us cross off a whole bunch more. The rest of that list is a story for another day.