It seems that a more than profound change in the evolution of SolusOS, the popular distribution based on Debian. The topic was proposed a few days ago by our friend Yoyo Fernandez, founder of the blog Pardus Life, Ikey doherty, Founder of SolusOS, this Google+ post, and he in turn shared the idea later on the SolusOS forum.
Apparently, Ikey is starting to get fed up with developing his distro on Debian due to the work involved in its maintenance, especially in the patched and cleaning packages GNOME3 who break into repositories and threaten to break the desktop of SolusOS, for what you have considered stop developing SolusOS 2 (currently in alpha 5 stage) on top of Debian to rebuild it from scratch, with its own independent repositories, and using the package management system of Pardus, PiSi (what does it mean Packages Installed Successfully as Intended).
The reasons that Ikey explained in the forum for using the package of Pardus are the following:
Delta Packages
Best known for its implementation in distros RPM , the Fedora y OpenSUSE, Delta technology allows only the parts of packages that have been modified to be downloaded during an update, so the download size is much smaller. Ikey puts for example that a 741 MB update would be reduced to just 70 MB, with the consequent saving in time and bandwidth that would take not only the user of SolusOS update your system, but at the same Ikey upload the update to the repositories. The .pisi packages are also compatible with Delta technology.
LTS
By not worrying about maintenance periods of Debian nor of the updates of this that can break the desktop, Ikey assures that «You could easily create a Solus OS 2 LTS with 5 years of support ».
ISO size
Since .pisi packages use XZ compression, the ISO of Solus OS 2, which currently weighs in at almost 1GB, would shrink so much that it would fit comfortably on a CD.
Patched
The patching of packages with the modifications of SolusOS It would be easier because being a mother distro, only the packages that they choose would be uploaded to the repositories, without having to monitor the ones they send Debian.
¿Fork or derivative?
Ikey clarifies that, although they would be using the package management system of Pardus and its installer (YALI), the system would not be based on Pardus rather it would be a project started from scratch.
Workload
One of the benefits of the PiSi package is the ease it provides for building packages. Ikey admits that, of course, building the system and provisioning the repositories would require a good investment of time, but ensures that a SolusOS based on PiSi would take less effort than one based on Debian. He adds that, for example, he began to experiment with the construction of a GNOME on PiSi from scratch and managed to advance a quarter in 2 hours. In addition, an application would be developed to create .pisi packages from tarballs In a simple way.
So there is the proposal. It is paradoxical to see how the same Pardus recently abandoned its own base to move on to develop on Debian Testing, while a distribution previously based on Debian It also changes its course to take a similar one to the old one Pardus. From the blackboard and from my point of view it is an interesting idea, although the main problem I see is that the number of available packages will drop drastically when using your own repositories instead of Debian ones, and it will take an extra effort to keep all those thousands of packages constantly updated and tested; although there is probably compatibility with the repositories of Pardus (which aren't especially big either). We will have to see how everything turns out once it is put into practice
By the way, today Ikey contacted the developers of Pardus Anka, fork de Pardus which maintains its original base, to propose a cooperative development of some aspects common to both distros such as the package manager, the installer and the tools for the construction and maintenance of the repositories; so everything indicates that the idea is already more than accomplished and Solus OS 2 will mark the beginning of a new stage in the hitherto short history of SolusOS.
Sources | Google+, SolusOS Forum, deb Linux