Attention: This guideline has been deprecated from October 25, 2020. We've switched to a newly-proposed Topic-Based Maintenance Guidelines; please refer to that document instead.

Rationale and Definition

Since the monthly update cycle was introduced to AOSC OS in July of 2017 (and later, seasonal update cycles introduced since July 2018), packages which represents feature, and non-bugfix/security updates should first have their build configurations pushed to the testing-proposed of the ABBS Tree, uploaded to the testing-proposed repositories - and made available in the stable repository at the end of each seasonal cycle after testing.

However, given the bugfix/security update may rely - and limited to - on backporting of patches, there are some other packages which could be...

• Category 1: Hard (or impossible in case of binary packages) to backport security/bugfix patches to, and frequently updated in mixture of feature and security updates. This category is most well represented by (larger) Web browsers, for example, Firefox and Chromium.
• Category 2: Heavily relied on frequent updates to remain functional. This category is most well represented by tools which reads online APIs/page contents for its basic functionality, for example, youtube-dl.
• Category 3: Essential to basic Internet access in certain regions. This category is most well represented by network utilities which have to work around new blockades and constraints, for example, shadowsocks.
• Category 4: AOSC OS distribution-specific development toolkits, which should be the newest at all times.

A list of packages exempt from branch rules are shown below.

Exception List

The list below is a comprehensive list of packages which could be considered as a part of the exception list - meaning that these packages' build configurations could be pushed to the stable-proposed branch, as a part of the effort to address bugs, usability issues, and security vulnerabilities. These updates are then made available in the stable repositories after testing - regardless of the version changes, and whether new features are to be introduced.