A community that works together, builds together

August has been an active month for the project across various core tooling repositories. Developers are working on multiple fronts to improve moss. Tarkah has expanded the hardlink driver approach with a reflink strategy for filesystems that support it, aiming for a filesystem-agnostic EROFS metadata-image based approach. Fabio is reorganising the command tree, adding new functionalities and enhancing existing ones.

Jonathan is working on better search and shell completion features. Joey has optimized boulder, making package packaging quicker and offering techniques like BOLT for key packages. Reilly has led the expansion of the packaging team, ensuring ABI sanity and protecting against bit rot. Bryan is developing a new TUI-based lichen installer, featuring automatic disk formatting, system-model-driven installs, and a refined TUI navigation experience.

Alice and NomadicCore have created a new Discourse forum to replace GitHub Discussions, with community feedback incorporated. The project's branding has been refined, changing the name from AerynOS to aerynOS, along with slight adjustments to logo colours and fonts. The team has expanded with a "Trusted Maintainers" role, and new Packaging Policy and Issue/PR templates have been implemented.

Work on EROFS metadata-only images continues, while a more general filesystem tree abstraction within moss has been delivered. This abstraction, along with a reflink approach for supported filesystems, allows moss to work with various filesystem tree approaches. The moss command line is being restructured, with commands being converted to the clap_derive for a cleaner foundation and better future extensibility.

Search functionality improvements are also ongoing, focusing on making package and file searching more intuitive and cohesive. Boulder, the package build tool, now emits multiple packages concurrently and has updated BOLT optimisation configuration.