Solus: A New Voyage
As a community and a team, we have been through some choppy waters the last few months. After extensive internal discussions involving consultation with contributors past and present, we have charted a new course for long term success which will yield immediate results for users and contributors. As of today, we are deploying a new, more resilient infrastructure and a new governance structure for Solus.
Previously, our build and development infrastructure was hosted on-premises at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This infrastructure was only accessible to (and physically serviceable by) one individual. On January 17th 2023, Solus infrastructure suffered a hardware-level issue that caused a service outage. This outage resulted in almost three months of service downtime, which impacted the ability to update and deliver packages, communicate on the Solus forums, or access the website (which was rehosted on GitHub Pages on February 27th). Alongside this service downtime, there was minor data loss for a limited set of package git repositories on the server which hosted the development tracker (Phabricator).
Both prior to and during the outage, active Solus team members offered to help mitigate the infrastructure bus-factor issue and move the infrastructure to more accessible hosting providers. These efforts were not met with success. In parallel, the Solus team members stepped up to communicate with the community when there was otherwise an absence of information.