Hello everyone,
the new Apertis v2019pre.0 preview release is now available!
No major changes are expected before the stable v2019.0 release happens next
quarter, so people waiting for it can start experimenting with the current
preview release.
You can find the full release notes at
https://wiki.apertis.org/V2019pre/ReleaseNotes
Some highlights from this release:
* Automatic web-based online OTA updates using OSTree
In addition to the automatic offline updates over USB Mass Storage
devices, the Apertis update agent now support polling for updates over
the network and retrieving the updated contents over HTTPS using OSTree.
* NFS boot
The artifacts needed to boot Apertis using TFTP/NFS are now part of the
official release artifacts, see for instance the ones for the armhf ARM
32bit platform.
Booting over TFTP/NFS is an invaluable development help while working on
lower level components and in particular when working on the kernel,
providing a much faster iteration cycle compared to deploying to a
bootable SD card.
* Portable toolchain
The Apertis toolchain is now also available as a pre-built downloadable
tarball ready to be unpacked on systems running third-party
distributions such as Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial.
Combined with the sysroots it allows developers to reliably and
efficiently cross-build binaries for Apertis without having to boot the
Apertis SDK.
* GitLab-based packaging workflow
A new workflow has been set up to make contributing to Apertis much easier.
Now any package on Apertis can be updated by submitting merge requests
to its corresponding project on GitLab. The Gitlab-based packaging
workflow guide walks developers through the steps needed, sensibly
lowering the learning curve for developers new to the Debian-based
packaging tools.
Developers now have a coherent and reliable workflow that applies to all
the packages in the archive using the same contribution process used for
all the other Apertis projects, while maintainers have finer grained
control on the downstream changes that get applied.
Currently the workflow is active for all the packages in the :target
repository, but support will be extended to all packages soon after this
release.
The full release notes contain more details about all the work that has
landed in this release:
https://wiki.apertis.org/V2019pre/ReleaseNotes
Images are already available for download at
https://images.apertis.org/release/v2019pre/v2019pre.0/
Thanks to everyone who contributed!
