Release Management

Release management is as simple as plan, build, test, prepare and deploy.

Package management

LibreELEC is made up of over 800 packages which are in themselves developed by many other teams and groups across the Internet. These packages are maintained in the packages directory. An example of a package is Linux which has its main LibreELEC makefile as packages/linux/package.mk, or Kodi packages/mediacenter/kodi/package.mk.

The project team and Contributors prepare and regularly update the code that makes up the LibreELEC distribution. This is done by "bumping" the PKG_VERSION in the package.mk file and updating the other variables, code, patches and dependencies that make up the distribution. These are then rolled up into a https://github.com/LibreELEC/documentation/blob/master/development-1/git-tutorial.md#pullrequestsand submitted as a change.

Release Monitoring

The update-scan tool has been developed to check PKG_VERSION of packages against release monitoring sites. This tool currently uses Anitya from https://release-monitoring.org/ with the following distribution https://release-monitoring.org/distro/LibreELEC/

An example of the output from update-scan is below:

$ tools/update-scan
Github api usage activated

Updates found:

Package            | LE git master         | upstream location
--------------------------------------------------------------
Pillow             | 8.4.0                 | 9.0.1
Python3            | 3.8.12                | 3.11.0a5
RPi.GPIO           | 0.7.1a4               | 0.7.0
.
.
.

The tool provides a report at the end of the currency of the packages in the current checked out LibreELEC code.

Current 449:
Jinja2 Mako MarkupSafe ...

Ignored 84:
adafruit-libraries alsa ...

Packages not known at tracker 23:
RTL8192CU configtools dvb-latest edid-decode firmware-dragonboard \
firmware-imx gcc-riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu getscancodes \
gnulib jdk-aarch64-zulu jdk-arm-zulu jdk-x86_64-zulu kmscube \
lan951x-led-ctl media_tree oscam szap-s2 t2scan tune-s2 unfsd \
vdr-plugin-dummydevice vdr-plugin-wirbelscancontrol vdr-plugin-wirbelscan

Packages are ignored if either the PKG_VERSION or PKG_URL __ are empty or hosted by LibreELEC.

For packages not known at the tracker - this means that the package is either not release monitored or not configured for release monitoring at https://release-monitoring.org/distro/LibreELEC/.

The following image shows the Projects of LibreELEC monitored by release-monitoring.

Adding a project to the distro can be made by logging in using your Fedora ID.

Search for the project that you have developed the package.mk for and you want release-monitoring to monitor. In the example - we have added the distro LibreELEC to aixlog.

Click the Add new distribution mapping button within the Project https://release-monitoring.org/project/141477/ (aixlog example.)

You need to choose LibreELEC from the Distribution drop down. Then click + Add mapping to project.

The Package Name must match the PKG_NAME variable from the LibreELEC package.mk file. The Project name from the Project in release-monitoring.org does not have to match the LibreELEC PKG_NAME.