XBian Stable release…

Since XBian project started, we all have been working towards the holly grail, the XBian 1.0 stable release. You may all say that it never arrived.
If XBian is like other similar distributions, we have at least four stable releases already, but no, we do not have those as we are different as you know.

The main difference is that we are working with constant apt-updates and because of that we have a rolling releases. In some distributions, constant updates, rolling releases and actual image releases are well combined.

In XBian we wanted to take this approach a little step further and drop these regular image versioning altogether.

Lately we have been discussing a new and simple version numbering system. What we have come up with is just a date format, which we think it would be the best. It is easily recognizable and you always see where you are with your release. When you already install the latest xbian-update you’ll see the version such as: XBian 20141231-2. These versions should soon be accompanied by a XBian_2014.12.31-2_rpi.img.gz and so on for direct download from our download page.

This means we dropped the Alpha, Beta and Nightly images.

Instead, we are going to release weekly images that are generated with the latest stable packages which people are using through apt updates.

Whenever serious bugs are reported in a weekly image, we will fix it and than wait for the next new one to arrive.

In case of new platforms such as CuBox-I and Hummingboard, we upload releases to sourceforge for manual download and testing but also these are available through the XBian-installer too. All this is be done automatically.

So with this system in place, you can always download the most up-to-date XBian version and it doesn’t matter if you upgrade your system or reinstall. You will always get the same version. If you would need to reinstall, just pick the latest image and start updating from there.

So the “XBian stable release” will actually never arrive in that sense, because we do have stable releases in place for a long time already