Dear Armbian developers, board maintainers and users. Our regular development cycle have reached »code freeze«. Its a milestone when we shall change our focus to code stabilisation to be ready to release update to all kernels and images. This should happen by the end of this month (25th). During this time we count on increased help for testing.

For this period we will enforce stricter merge request rules. From today on, code can be merged with minimal of two people approvals. However it is not expected that you drop existing work in progress at once but gradually finish it. If a feature changes are minor, they will still be accepted, but lets focus on bugs and stability for the next couple of weeks.

# for testing next framework clone it to the new folder
git clone https://github.com/armbian/build.git -b armbian-next armbian-next

This will be the last build from master branch, before switching to next generation build framework which has been intensively developed on a side for past two years. We are receiving complete rework of logging and patching system, UX is completely reworked. Compilation is now possible without additional compilers, caching system was severely extended and improved. WSL2 is now officially supported, compilations works much faster, cleaner and safer.

Overview for changes related to release and switching to next in between and after:

  • code freeze starts today
  • rename armbian-next to main and stop re-basing in next two weeks
  • start accepting code after changing to main only (bug fixes goes to master too)
  • change sources to commits so last master remains immutable just before making RC builds
  • make a release candidate (from 23.02/master) (after two weeks)
  • make a release (from 23.02/master) (last week)

After release:

  • mid march, switch master to classic and label as frozen and unmaintained
  • change default branch in GitHub to main
  • release 23.05 from new code

Additional informations:
Igor Pecovnik, Project lead
igor@armbian.com