%poky; ] > The Yocto Project release process is predictable and consists of both major and minor (point) releases. This brief chapter provides information on how releases are named, their life cycle, and their stability.

The Yocto Project delivers major releases (e.g. &DISTRO;) using a six month cadence roughly timed each April and October of the year. Following are examples of some major YP releases with their codenames also shown. See the "Major Release Codenames" section for information on codenames used with major releases. 2.2 (Morty) 2.1 (Krogoth) 2.0 (Jethro) While the cadence is never perfect, this timescale facilitates regular releases that have strong QA cycles while not overwhelming users with too many new releases. The cadence is predictable and avoids many major holidays in various geographies. The Yocto project delivers minor (point) releases on an unscheduled basis and are usually driven by the accumulation of enough significant fixes or enhancements to the associated major release. Following are some example past point releases: 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.2.1 The point release indicates a point in the major release branch where a full QA cycle and release process validates the content of the new branch. Realize that there can be patches merged onto the stable release branches as and when they become available.

Each major release receives a codename that identifies the release in the Yocto Project Source Repositories. The concept is that branches of Metadata with the same codename are likely to be compatible and thus work together. Codenames are associated with major releases because a Yocto Project release number (e.g. &DISTRO;) could conflict with a given layer or company versioning scheme. Codenames are unique, interesting, and easily identifiable. Releases are given a nominal release version as well but the codename is used in repositories for this reason. You can find information on Yocto Project releases and codenames at .

Once released, the release enters the stable release process at which time a person is assigned as the maintainer for that stable release. This maintainer monitors activity for the release by investigating and handling nominated patches and backport activity. Only fixes and enhancements that have first been applied on the "master" branch (i.e. the current, in-development branch) are considered for backporting to a stable release. The current Yocto Project policy regarding backporting is to consider bug fixes and security fixes only. Policy dictates that features are not backported to a stable release. This policy means generic recipe version upgrades are unlikely to be accepted for backporting. The exception to this policy occurs when a strong reason exists such as the fix happens to also be the preferred upstream approach. Stable release branches have strong maintenance for about a year after their initial release. Should significant issues be found for any release regardless of its age, fixes could be backported to older releases. For issues that are not backported given an older release, Community LTS trees and branches exist where community members share patches for older releases. However, these types of patches do not go through the same release process as do point releases. You can find more information about stable branch maintenance at .