[Replicant] Replicant 6.0 Roadmap

Wolfgang Wiedmeyer wreg at wiedmeyer.de
Fri Feb 17 22:14:56 UTC 2017


Kurtis Hanna writes:

> I'm just curious about what the roadmap looks like for Replicant 6.0.
> I'd consider it to be Alpha right now, since it is limited to the
> forums. I guess I'm just wanting to spark a discussion about lifecycles
> in the project in general.
>
> Some specific questions I have though are:
>
> Will Replicant 6.0 become Beta and be included in the official Git Repo
> after certain milestones are reached? If so, what are the milestones?
>
> If it is added to the official Git Repo as a Beta release, would this
> mean that the Issues part of Redmine can then be used for 6.0 related
> issues at that point?
>
> If the project doesn't do Beta releases, what are the blockers to making
> Replicant 6.0 an official release?

Probably only Paul can answer these questions. As I also don't have any
certain information, I would obviously like to know this, too.

> From what I understand, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the most
> recent security updates have not been added to the official Replicant
> 4.2 release. If this is the case, it seems like we should either add
> those security updates to 4.2 ASAP or work towards a Replicant 6.0
> release ASAP. If the best way forward is to focus on the Replicant 6.0
> official release, it would be good to have an enumerated list of issues
> that need to be resolved before the release so we can, as a community,
> prioritize them.

Between September and November of 2015, Moritz and I have submitted various
fixes for security issues and security-related enhancements. We are
talking here about more than 40 individual security fixes. Not a single
one of these was ever part of any release since then. I started working
on Replicant 6.0 in December 2015 and stopped working on security
patches then. Moritz also stopped submitting security patches at that
time. It's possible to build Replicant 4.2 images with these patches
From source using my branch:
repo init -u https://code.fossencdi.org/replicant_manifest.git -b replicant-4.2
The last time I used it was somewhere in December 2015, so I don't know if
it still works, but it should.

Android 4.2 is EOL since a very long time and it was already very hard
to backport fixes at the time I did these patches. If you would count all
serious security issues that are related to Android 4.2 since that time,
you can easily get to a three-digit number and probably far beyond. Just
to put this into perspective.

But Replicant 6.0 is far from perfect either. The biggest issue is that
we can't use a current webview and have to resort to a version from July
2015, which is still a lot newer than the webview in Replicant
4.2. Getting llvmpipe working will fix this issue.

Otherwise, kernel fixes are included from LineageOS (former CyanogenMod)
and the last time a few weeks ago, I worked together with Simon Shields
From LineageOS to sort out some of the recent kernel patches. In general
with the old kernel versions that the Replicant-supported devices use
(except the GTA04), it can't be guaranteed that all issues are
patched. Google's monthly security patches can simply be merged from
LineageOS and the next version of Replicant 6.0 will have the January
2017 security level while the current one has the level of December
2016.

Best regards,
Wolfgang

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