If this is your first time following along with elementary OS development then it’s very important for us to note that we work a little bit differently. Instead of basing our releases on how much time has passed, we base them on how much work we can get done. We want every new release of elementary OS to be significantly better than the last release. We don’t hold back updates from previous releases unless it’s necessary on a technical level. That’s why our last release, Freya, had several updates throughout the past year. Major releases happen when large technical changes happen. For developers, you’ll know these changes as “API breaks”.

Currently, elementary OS releases are built using the Ubuntu package repositories (repos). At the beginning of the cycle, we choose a target repo to work from. For Loki, that repo is Ubuntu 16.04. We set up a daily repo where we build our source code against that Ubuntu repo. Sometimes things build straight away and sometimes builds fail because of things like API breaks. We find the causes of the build failures and update our source code until everything compiles.

https://elementary.io/developer

https://elementary.io/

skipped to Freya

initial release, deprecated