2.3 KiB
Release cycle
RIOT has a new release every three months and is named after the month it
was feature frozen in. E.g. 2021.01 was feature frozen in January 2021.
Feature freeze means the branch off point of the <YYYY.MM>-branch with
<YYYY.MM> being the releases name. As such, any new feature merged into the
master after that point, will be part of the next release. That branch, which
we will call the release branch in the following is then the stable branch of
RIOT.
After feature freeze, the current release candidate in the release branch is
tested heavily. For more information on the release testing, have a look at our
release specifications. Bug fixes that are made during this
testing period are back ported from master to the release branch and a new
release candidate might be created when a certain milestone is found. If all
major bugs are fixed, the new RIOT release is signed off by the appointed
release manager, usually within 2 weeks after the feature freeze.
RIOT follows a rolling release cycle, meaning, that support and bug fixes are only provided for the most current release.
Download a release
You can download the source code of our releases via Github as ZIP file or tarball. Alternatively, you can check them out if you already cloned RIOT with Git:
$ git pull --tags
$ git checkout <YYYY.MM>
Point releases and hot fixes
For major bug fixes, we may provide a point release YYYY.MM.N which results in
a new ZIP file or tarball over at the release page. However, minor
bug fixes are only pushed to the release branch. You can fetch that via Git
using
$ git clone -b `<YYYY.MM>-branch` https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT
or
$ git pull origin <YYYY.MM-branch>:<YYYY.MM-branch>
$ git checkout <YYYY.MM-branch>
if you have RIOT already cloned.