Koen's blog

The OpenEmbedded project has started to maintain a stable branch, next to its development branch, on March 28th 2007. Besides "org.openembedded.dev" there now is the "org.openembedded.stable" branch.

The plumbing work on the development branch (long-term improvements such as packaged staging, creating stand-alone SDK toolchains and a new package manager) colides with the goal of offering a stable base for OpenEmbedded-derived distributions. Some projects, most notably the Angstrom distribution, already maintained a stable branch for this reason.

The effort of maintaining a stable branch is now centralized back into the OpenEmbedded project. The main goal of the stable branch is to provide a branch that progresses in time with a minimum of disruptive changes, especially to the framework, which include classes, configuration namespace, package management, and tooling such as the bitbake tool. Changes to the stable branch are selected and reviewed according to an agreed upon policy before being committed to the stable branch. This will require extra effort from the OpenEmbedded developer community.

The stable branch is not intended to keep up with the pace of development on the development branch. Planned is to create new stable branches every year; the next stable branch is scheduled to branch of the development tree during 2008.12. Old stable branches will go in unmaintained mode 3 months after a new stable branch is created; the current stable will retire 2009.2.

OpenEmbedded projects and distributions now have the choice of at least a .dev and .stable branch and the OpenEmbedded developers can keep on plumbing.

mailinglist | ViewMTN