Editions
Peios has no channels and no release cadence. It is a rolling release with a full archive: every version of every package ever published stays installable. What it has instead of a channel is an edition — a package that says what a Peios is.
The edition package #
peios-experimental is the edition today. It is an ordinary peipkg package with an unusual job:
- Its version is the OS version.
peios-experimental 2026.8-1is Peios 2026.8. The package writes/usr/lib/os-release(VERSION_ID="2026.8",VARIANT_ID=experimental,PRETTY_NAME="Peios 2026.8 Experimental") and the/usr/etc/os-releasecompatibility symlink, so a system's identity and its release are one fact, tracked in the package database. - Its dependencies are the base system. Kernel, modules and firmware; the initramfs —
prelude, its hooks, the module subset and its own base tree, each placedIN initramfsexplicitly; the service manager, registry, identity and networking daemons; the installer. Installing the package into an empty root yields a bootable Peios. - It provides
peios-release. Depend on that virtual name to mean "some Peios"; depend on the edition to mean that edition. - It ships
release.toml: what the release asks of a system beyond its packages, as data. - It declares an alternate upgrade path. peipkg refuses to install or upgrade it by name, holds it back from an upgrade of everything, and prints the message it carries: To upgrade Peios use the
upgrade-peioscommand. The reasons are below.
"Experimental" is a name, not a channel. It marks that Peios is not yet production-ready and says nothing about cadence. When enough exists for the split to make sense it is replaced by peios-pro, peios-minimal, peios-desktop and so on — each its own package, each providing peios-release, each shipping its own os-release.
What the edition deliberately does not contain #
Three things a live medium needs are absent from the edition, because they are properties of the medium:
live-bootanddisk-boot. Which boot packages a system carries depends on what it boots from. The installer swaps one for the other on the target; an edition that named either would be installable on only one kind of medium.peios-dwe. The Developer Workstation Environment makes a machine ownable. It is added by peiso for a development medium and could never be a thing that arrives by installing a package.- Anything the installer is not.
peios-installis in the edition: an installed system can install another.
Pinning #
Experimental's dependencies are >= floors — a floor lets a package move without republishing the edition on every change, which is right for a pre-alpha. A production edition pins exact versions, and then something useful follows: peipkg upgrade cannot move a pinned dependency past what the edition allows, so a real release upgrades as a unit, through upgrade-peios, never piecemeal.
Why the package manager will not move it #
Installing a package on Peios cannot change system policy. A package delivers files; which services run and which policies apply is decided by registry seeds that a package can only offer. That is the deliberate weakness that lets packages be installed freely.
Moving from one release to the next is more than a package upgrade: the new release's seeds have to be reconciled, and that is precisely the thing peipkg must not do. So the edition declares, in its manifest, alternate_upgrade = { message = "To upgrade Peios use the upgrade-peios command." } (PSPU §5.18). The declaration grants nothing — a package cannot name a command for the consumer to run, let alone run one. Its whole effect is that peipkg stops and shows the message, with a warning that whatever the message names sits outside the package manager's protections. The person runs upgrade-peios, which drives peipkg with --bypass-alternate-upgrade and then does the reconciling itself.
Where an edition lives #
The recipe is pkgs/peios-experimental/ in the Peios tree: a pekit.toml whose build writes os-release and release.toml, and a package.pekit.toml with the dependency table. Changing what Peios contains is a change there, followed by a republish. peiso and its spec do not change.