Let us explain why this forum has been renamed from “Unofficial Portings” to “Community Portings” and some of the topics have been made sticky.
You may also have noticed, that a number of already released versions have been moved to this forum section.
This forum section offers community members the opportunity to share and discuss Volumio portings, which will not officially be supported and therefore not appear on the Download page.
Why this suddenly? Does this main, Volumio support is getting limited to only the main boards like PI and X86?
The answer is no, there will always be additional boards, which are either very popular or supported by hardware suppliers (which also support the Volumio team). Image versions for these boards will continue to appear on the Download page.
At the same time we will continue to support portings for different platforms, just a little different than before.
Since the release of Volumio 2 on our main platforms PI and X86, the core team has steadily increased support for new boards with a new release for the popular ones 2-3 times a year.
The number of different board is still growing, one only has to look at the efforts, which is currently being put into the Amlogic and Orange and Nano PI platforms.
It is slowly becoming a “problem”, the core team cannot perform all the regression testing for each of them before releasing.
This is the reason why some versions have not been updated for ages, we regret that and therefore decided to change the situation by pushing community build & support.
We are convinced that this will improve the availability of new image versions, possibly more than 2-3 a year, this depends on the maintainer.
The core team will be able to concentrate on the main platform, improving it and add functionality, while the community is taking care of testing and releasing their versions.
New images can be made available as soon as such a Volumio development cycle is finished.
Anyone willing to help maintain (and add) such portings is very welcome and we will continue help with questions, solving build problems and reviewing.
We also have a porting guide in the Volumio documentation set.
When porting, there are two options:
- keeping one’s own repo and image store (meaning external to the Volumio servers, the core team cannot help building images)
- hosting the build scripts and images on the Volumio server (like with most of the existing portings)
The core team will generate your images and supply you with a link for testing (and publishing in your thread).
We already have examples, the last few months a number of developers help building images for their preferred boards (which were not on our list).
You will find these examples as sticky’s in this form section.
To help users find information (and links) to the latest image versions, we strongly advice to reserve this for the opening post and maintain them there.
This should always hold the link to the latest Volumio image version, a smal l description of what was changed, while a history of older links is advisable.
Not all OPs have been structured that way yet, we hope to do achieve that with the help of the corrsponding devs.
Happy building
Volumio Mods and Devs