What will happen /e/ phones based on LineageOS 14.1?

madbilly · May 3, 2019, 11:47am

Hi /e/ team!

Since LineageOS stopped supporting 14.1 two months ago what is the plan for those /e/ phones to continue being supported? I can’t find an existing discussion about this, which is surprising.

I tried to find a quick reference of which devices were on which branch, and which were official, community, unofficial or custom builds and there isn’t one, as far as I can find. This kind of quick reference would be really helpful.

Cheers

Anonyme · May 3, 2019, 12:02pm

Is that your answer ?

LeEco S2 becomes "unofficial /e/ build"

In place of ‘UNOFFICIAL’ now you would see ‘Community’ mentioned.

To summarize the Community builds are

Phones may or may not be supported by Lineage …for e.g Essential ‘mata’ has an /e/ build but not Lineage support

The impact of Lineage stopping support means that for /e/ users there will be a short period of time when the device will not be getting up to date security patches

This also means that at present we do not have a separate device maintainer for this particular device…Device maintainers are users who volunteer to build the ROM for the device.

In absence of a dedicated device maintainer /e/ builds team builds the ROM for the device

We are working on upgrading our infrastructure so that all devices can be provided up to date security patches including those not supported by lineage

Lastly we do not have plans to drop any device from our list of supported devices. All devices on our list will continue to be supported

Build quality is better compared to ‘UNOFFICIAL’ - i.e. they are more stable

‘Community’ build will have OTA support

‘UNOFFICIAL’ : builds on the other hand will be

built using /e/ source code

No OTA support

Can be downloaded from the /e/ website

madbilly · May 3, 2019, 12:09pm

Hi @Anonyme thanks for that link and info quote. I think that this confirms that /e/ phones which use a no-longer-supported version of LineageOS will become community builds and will pretty much be the same quality as official builds, although they may not receive security updates as quickly as before.

It’s confusing that they’re called community builds but the post then says that the /e/ builds team does the builds and there is no community device maintainer; that sounds like an oxymoron!

I’m looking forward to /e/ having sufficient resource to takeover the provision of security updates for these devices which don’t have LineageOS support any more.

Cheers