Attention

EWAOL development has moved to the SOAFEE Special Interest Group and is now hosted at https://gitlab.com/soafee/ewaol/meta-ewaol, and the official documentation at: https://meta-ewaol.docs.soafee.io/.
For more details on SOAFEE, please see https://soafee.io/.
Note the following documentation is only applicable to the EWAOL’s repo hosted here: https://gitlab.arm.com/ewaol/meta-ewaol.

Codeline Management

The EWAOL project is released and developed based on Yocto’s release branch process. This strategy allows us to make Major, Minor and Point/Patch Releases based on upstream stable branches, reducing the risk of having build and runtime issues.

Yocto Release Process Overview


_images/ewaol_rel_yocto_overview.png

The diagram above gives an overview of the Yocto branch and release process:

  • Development happens primarily in the master (or main) branch.

  • The project has a major release roughly every 6 months where a stable release branch is created.

  • Each major release has a codename which is also used to name the stable release branch (e.g. kirkstone).

  • Once a stable branch is created and released, it only receives bug fixes with minor (point) releases on an unscheduled basis.

  • The goal is for users and 3rd parties layers to use these codenamed branches as a means to be compatible with each other.

For a complete description of the Yocto release process, support schedule and other details, see the Yocto Release Process documentation.

EWAOL Branch and Release Process


_images/ewaol_rel_dev_branches.png

EWAOL’s branch and release process is based on the Yocto release process. The following sub-sections describe in more details the branch strategy for EWAOL’s development and release process.

EWAOL main branch

  • Represented by the green line on the diagram above.

  • The repository’s main branch is meant to be compatible with master or main branches from Poky and 3rd party layers.

  • meta-ewaol is not actively developed on this main branch to avoid the instability inherited from Yocto development on the master branch.

  • To reduce the effort required to move EWAOL to a new version of Yocto, this main branch is periodically updated with patches from the EWAOL development branches on a regular basis.

EWAOL development branches

  • Represented by the red line on the diagram above.

  • EWAOL uses development branches based/compatible with Yocto stable branches.

  • A development branch in EWAOL is setup for each new Yocto release using the name convention <codename>-dev where <codename> comes from target Yocto release.

  • The development branches in EWAOL are where fixes, improvements and new features are developed.

  • On a regular basis, code from the development branch is ported over to the main branch to reduce the effort required to move EWAOL to a new version of Yocto.

EWAOL release branches

  • Represented by the blue line on the diagram above.

  • A new release branch in EWAOL is setup for each new Yocto release using the Yocto codename the branch targets.

  • Hot fixes in the release branch are back ported to the development branch.

  • Release branches are currently maintained not much longer than a Yocto release period (~7 months).

EWAOL release tags

  • EWAOL is tagged using the version format v<Major>.<Minor>.<Patch>.

  • Tags are always applied to commits from the release branch.

  • The first release in a release branch is a Major release.

  • Following releases in a release branch advance the Minor version number.

  • Patch releases are mainly used for hot fixes which are then back ported to the development branch.

  • Both Major and Minor releases may receive fixes, improvements and new features while Patch releases only receive fixes. Poky and 3rd party layers release/stable branches might be updated and pinned.