AOSCC 2017: Re-cap

Here's a re-cap of our 4th AOSCC, in Guangzhou. Similar to last year, our annual gathering lasted 3 days. Numerous of our community developers shared their review of community development, and presented the path forward for our community in the coming year. Though Day 3 was disorganised as ever (LOL), it could be safely assumed that virtually everybody was having great fun attending this year's community gathering.

Without getting ahead of ourselves, here's a very quick re-cap, as promised:

• Like last year's AOSCC in Shanghai, our venue was generously provided by the Electronic Engineering Club of Guangdong University of Technology - on their campus location at the H.E.M.C. (Higher Education Mega Center) in Guangzhou.
• We have received over 50 sign-ups to attend the gathering, though not everyone made it to Guangzhou, more than 40 attended, another increase from last year's statistics.
• Six speakers from in and around our community talked on Day 1 and 2.

Several community matters are determined, as usual, on Day 1:

• AOSCC 2018 will take place next summer in Wuhan, China.
• The next Core release series, Core 5, is named "eMMC".
• No new architecture ports planned for the coming year.
• Two default wallpapers will be shipped with the next annual cycle, one of which is a rendered piece made with Blender, the other made with Krita - both wallpapers share the same basic theme and design.

Finally, several things could be expected from AOSC OS:

• Starting this month, AOSC OS will be updated in a monthly cycle, the old rolling-release "schedule" is no more, more details could be found in our third installment of Dev. Updates.
• AOSC OS will provide a new performance (processor instruction set), or device-specific "Overlay" system, providing tweaked and optimised packages for newer and more specialised devices, more details coming later.
• AOSC OS will receive more refinement in the UX (User eXperience), QA (Quality Assurance), and security fronts, details rolling in throughout the coming year.
• AOSC developers will work harder on user/deverloper documentation for AOSC OS and other community projects, in the form of a community wiki along with a collection of erratas and knowledge-base articles.
• Ciel, an OverlayFS-based container/distribution manager will be deployed as the officially endorsed framework for packaging and distribution tarball/image generation. A more detailed article introducing this new toolkit will be published in the near future along with full developer/user documentations.
• ACBS will be re-released in its re-written form in C/C++.
• Our current array of architectural ports, consisting of AMD64, ARMv7, AArch64, MIPS32el, MIPS64el, PPC32eb, PPC64eb to a total of 7 - will continue to be supported as official ports of AOSC OS.

Photographs, Presentations, and Videos

Unfortunately we were unable to provide live coverage of our gathering due to networking constraints in the venue, we are currently going through our video recording and uploading to our community YouTube channel.

• Pictures of the gathering could be found on our Community page, in the "Gallery" section to the right.
• Documentations and presentations of AOSCC 2017, organised by speakers, could be downloaded and redistributed at your preference here.

See You Next Year!

Details regarding next year's AOSCC in Wuhan will be posted later this year, and towards summer next year.