For several years now, our primary branch has been called strawberry-dev. This name came about during a development period in which I had three branches: vanilla contained a mostly unmodified kernel circa 2012, chocolate-dev contained development towards the GUI (still during the days of the old compositor), and strawberry-dev was supposed to include some new kernel work; master remained a stable state. Eventually, work from strawberry-dev was occasionally merged into master, but chocolate-dev and vanilla stagnated. This led to strawberry-dev becoming the default branch as master was only updated when it was deemed stable. Now, after three years of this, we're finally getting rid of strawberry-dev and making master the default branch again. If you have a checkout of our git repository, you'll want to pull and then checkout master and make sure it has an appropriate remote.

A Travis build in under two minutes

I've also spent some time working on our CI pipeline. We use Travis to run builds after every push to Github. This process used to involve building a complete toolchain, which meant that Travis runs would take about 25 minutes to finish. We were also running on the old Travis infrastructure and wanted to upgrade. We've now reduced the build time to under two minutes using cached toolchains. There's still more work to do to make our CI builds actually useful from a testing perspective, and we hope to eventually produce live CDs of every build and host them on S3.

Live CD

Micro Live CD

Speaking of live CDs - did you know we host a handful of CDs ourselves? You can get an up-to-date general-purpose Live CD built from make cd, or some older, tailored CDs like this 10MB "micro" distribution. Suggested QEMU arguments are -vga std -m 512 -enable-kvm -soundhw ac97 -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139.