Solus Packagers Rejoice: Solbuild Is the New, Faster Solus Package Build System

We knew it was destined to happen sooner or later, the evobuild package build system used in the Solus Linux-based operating system for building packages in the .eopkg format is now officially deprecated.

The big news came earlier this morning from Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty, who informed the community that he finished work on the solbuild project, the next-generation, chroot-based package build system that lets developers efficiently and safely build Solus packages from source in an isolated and highly controlled environment. Solbuild succeeds the evobuild tool and makes use of OverlayFS.

"This release is the culmination of a lot of work that has entered in Solus recently, with support in place for integration into the build system, with ypkg and eopkg it is able to now support reproducible builds. After huge improvements to the Solus build machinery in the last week, all builds with latest ypkg, eopkg, and solbuild, are enormously faster than the older implementation," said Ikey Doherty.

Here's what package maintainers need to know about solbuild

First off, if you're currently using evobuild on your Solus machine to build packages for Solus, you need to stop right now, delete the files created when you've installed evobuild and proceed with the installation of solbuild as follows. Open a terminal emulator and run the following two commands to update your system and install Solbuild. Then use the next set of commands to initialize solbuild and update it.