I had a question regarding the release of ProffieOS features. I noticed on GitHub that the last release of ProffieOS was 7.14 and it was released almost a year ago. I am curious what the release process looks like for a new version of ProffieOS. I understand that someone can pull the code from GitHub and run the latest features using the code that is currently merged into the main branch. Is the code in the main branch considered stable, or in development? Is there any reason I shouldn’t install the code in the main branch on my lightsabers?
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The code on github is always under development, and is not “stable”.
Note that most of the time, it still works fairly well.
Eventually, we’ll release what is there as ProffieOS 8.x.
Note that once a version of ProffieOS has been released, no new features are added to it, only bugfixes. So if I release ProffieOS 7.15, it will not have any of the new code from github, only bugfixes.
It’s been taking me a long time to work on ProffieOS 8 though. Both the display code and the modes took a long time, and to complicate things we’ve encountered lots of compiler bugs on the way.
Another thing that slows things down is that I need people to help test stuff before it can be released to everybody. (That is ultimately the thing that separates “stable” code from “unstable” code: testing.)
Right now we’re testing arduino-proffieboard plugin 4.6, and I don’t think I can release ProffieOS 8 until that is done.
Thanks for the insight! I am relatively new to this community so I am still wrapping my head around ProffieOS. There are many different mentalities and methodologies regarding feature development. Your answer provides a lot of insight into the development of ProffieOS.
If someone wanted to get more involved in the development what things would be helpful?
Is there any documentation / resources for better understanding ProffieOS and in turn providing better contributions?
Writing documentation is a lot of work, and most people don’t like doing it, so not really.
Most of the documentation that does exist is targeted towards people who want to use ProffieOS, not add to it. There is plenty of information available, some of it is here on the crucible, some is on the POD and then there is the source code of course. But there isn’t a good guide or overview, so it’s hard to know where to start.
Documentation would probably be the most helpful, and as I said, we need more people to test things. However, it’s really mostly up to you: What do you want to do? Most of the interesting stuff that’s been added to ProffieOS came about because someone wanted that feature for something.
Good ideas 