Welcome to LineageOS’ regularly irregular review, where we go over changes in the last few weeks

Major changes since September 17th

Updated timezone data to 2018g on both 14.1 and 15.1 branches. This was done to reflect changes made in some countries regarding time zones.

More countries have been enabled for call recording. Remember that even if this feature is enabled, you are responsible for complying with your local laws regarding call recording.

The system profile tile is back on 15.1

Added support for AC3 audio tracks in matroska (.mkv) video files.

Chromium webview has been updated to version 69.0.3497.109 on both 15.1 and 14.1.

November security patches have been merged in 15.1.

October security patches have been merged in both 15.1 and 14.1 branches.

Fixed an issue where root could be enabled from ADB.

LineageOS 16.0

You may have noticed development has slowed down on 14.1 and 15.1. We have been working hard to prepare the next iteration of LineageOS, based on Android 9 Pie.

We have almost reached feature parity with 15.1, so now it’s time for several devices to get ready for official builds. Most of the remaining work is related to make old hardware work with the newer Android version.

We do not have an estimated release date, but we can tell you that we are getting closer.

Root access via ADB

On userdebug builds, Android allows users to run adb root to enable a root shell. In the past, we’ve disabled adb root unless you enable a flag in settings. This setting is only present if you’ve flashed the addonsu extra package, however, the flag could be set from a normal adb session. This setting is no longer changeable via adb shell .

We’ve also requested a CVE for this issue. This should be patched on all devices built starting later this week. This issue only affects devices that have adb enabled and are connected to a trusted machine. If you have adb enabled, (or if you don’t) please make sure you also have a lockscreen pin (and fingerprint, if desired) set.

Infrastructure

Website

As per your suggestions in the Summer Survey we have improved our website to be more user friendly and contain more information about the main features and goals of LineageOS. The blog has been moved to https://lineageos.org/blog (although the last article is still visible from the home page).

Builds

We have received new hardware! Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to make this happen (including OSU Open Source Labs, Academic Computer Club at Umeå University, and dotsrc.org).

It currently takes us about 10 hours to build a round of builds. We have consulted a specialized group of mathematicians, and they’ve informed us that there are more than 10 hours in a day. Hopefully this is accurate, we don’t really trust them.

The current plan is daily builds on the main branch, weekly builds on the last branch, and monthly builds, as needed, for older branches. We will not be building anything older than 14.1.

We realize 15.1 builds aren’t including many (if any) changes in a single day, but we’re taking this opportunity to make sure our infrastructure can keep up when 16.0 is released and work out any bugs in the new build system. This doesn’t mean you need to update every day (although you can if you want to), you can always flash newer builds even if they’re months/years newer than your current build.

We also took this upgrade as a chance to modernize (and open source) our build process. We’ve moved away from Jenkins in favor of Gitlab CI. You can see the current status of the build bots at https://builds.lineageos.org.

While some parts of our infrastructure are hosted on GitLab, we’re keeping GitHub as our main mirror, and still using Gerrit for our Code Review platform for all non-infrastructure projects.

Gerrit

Gerrit has been upgraded to 2.16. The old GWT UI has also been deprecated.

Jira

At the start of next year, we’re planning on moving away from Jira for bug tracking. Gitlab Issues fits our use case fairly well, is easier to manage, and reduces the need of another server to run Jira. There’s some development work that needs to be done to automate some of the issue collection. When this change comes, you’ll end up at the correct place when you go to Jira.

Summer Survey

We published the results of the second Summer Survey, check them out to see what our community told us.

Reddit

We’ll be attempting to post smaller changelogs for things, as they happen, on Reddit. Those updates will be included in blog posts going forward.

Build roster

This week we are dropping a number of 14.1 devices which maintainers are absent or not interested in maintaining them anymore. To resume builds, anyone can start submitting patches to gerrit and eventually step up as a maintainer.

Added 15.1 devices

Removed 15.1 devices

Removed 14.1 devices