ABIv1 vs ABIv11 and ABIv0, Branches, Upstream, Downstream, and other related items
amigamiaAdminamigamiaAdminEdited by amigamia on 04-09-2026 17:41, 3 days ago
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sonountaleban
AMIGASYSTEMDistro MaintainerAMIGASYSTEMDistro MaintainerterminillsMember
Posted 19 hours agoAMIGASYSTEMDistro MaintainerterminillsMember
Posted 19 hours agoEdited by terminills on 04-09-2026 20:13, 2 days ago
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olivier2222
AMIGASYSTEMDistro MaintaineramigamiaAdminEdited by amigamia on 04-09-2026 21:12, 2 days ago
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Argo, sonountaleban
olivier2222
sonountalebanMember
Posted 19 hours agoNot sure where to start from... anyway, I used to lurk in AROS.org and its associated forum in the previous decade until somebody decided to close it down, I remember very few guys (the Icaros guy for example) kept posting occasionally there, which meant for me (and probably many other people) that AROS was dead. I've rejumped again into AROS last year thanks to this forum, by the way the only place that actually looks alive with a sort of "community". I don't know the real reasons why Deadwood has created a new fork few years ago, I really want to know them because I suspect they were mostly related to the stagnating development of 64 bit version rather than technical issues - correct me if I'm wrong please. I found out here just recently there are these v1 and v11 versions and to be fair nobody talked badly (at least explicitly) about v1, last week Deadwood himself advised me to install and try v1 to check hardware compatibility. At practical level I see v11 is pretty supported with a growing archive website and community, while I can't say the same for v1 at the moment, apart AROS.org there are no other web resources... From a point of view I think it's fair to push to use v11 to be honest. Also I have to spend some frankly and unpleasant words about AROS.org: it's still stuck at Geocities era as I left long time ago, with most pages ridiculously outdated. I still see the Developers page with the original '90s developers pictures, who already abandoned AROS 20 years ago! So, you Terminills come here, occasionally post a bit snidy replies and you expect people to know the story, while your website that you v1 guys should take care is in questionable state and offers basically little information to newcomers. No mention about differences between v1 and v11 there, too... The v11 guys may have their faults but you v1 guys have a part of guilt about the current state of the things, of course. It's sad to read "this is my precious" type of stories above, it reminds me too much the AmigaOS4 drama, the Belgian mafia and all their sick ****. 
I think the best thing to do is to revamp completely AROS.org with more transparent information and the same here, maybe adding sections for x86 v1 and v11 and other flavours. The rest is just a BS.
I think the best thing to do is to revamp completely AROS.org with more transparent information and the same here, maybe adding sections for x86 v1 and v11 and other flavours. The rest is just a BS.
Edited by amigamia on 05-09-2026 10:34, 2 days ago
2 users reacted to this post
Argo
olivier2222
terminillsMember
Posted 19 hours ago@sonountaleban - Not sure where to start from... anyway, I used to lurk in AROS.org and its associated forum in the previous decade until somebody decided to close it down, I remember very few guys (the Icaros guy for example) kept posting occasionally there, which meant for me (and probably many other people) that AROS was dead. I've rejumped again into AROS last year thanks to this forum, by the way the only place that actually looks alive with a sort of "community". I don't know the real reasons why Deadwood has created a new fork few years ago, I really want to know them because I suspect they were mostly related to the stagnating development of 64 bit version rather than technical issues - correct me if I'm wrong please. I found out here just recently there are these v1 and v11 versions and to be fair nobody talked badly (at least explicitly) about v1, last week Deadwood himself advised me to install and try v1 to check hardware compatibility. At practical level I see v11 is pretty supported with a growing archive website and community, while I can't say the same for v1 at the moment, apart AROS.org there are no other web resources... From a point of view I think it's fair to push to use v11 to be honest. Also I have to spend some frankly and unpleasant words about AROS.org: it's still stuck at Geocities era as I left long time ago, with most pages ridiculously outdated. I still see the Developers page with the original '90s developers pictures, who already abandoned AROS 20 years ago! So, you Terminills come here, occasionally post a bit snidy replies and you expect people to know the story, while your website that you v1 guys should take care is in questionable state and offers basically little information to newcomers. No mention about differences between v1 and v11 there, too... The v11 guys may have their faults but you v1 guys have a part of guilt about the current state of the things, of course. It's sad to read "this is my precious" type of stories above, it reminds me too much the AmigaOS4 drama, the Belgian mafia and all their sick ****.
I think the best thing to do is to revamp completely AROS.org with more transparent information and the same here, maybe adding sections for x86 v1 and v11 and other flavours. The rest is just a BS.
You said "correct me if I'm wrong please." That's the one part of the post worth taking at face value, so here is the correction, and it comes from the repositories rather than from anyone's website.
The forum was not AROS.
Start here, because everything else in the post rests on it. The forum that closed was not aros.org and it was not the development project. Its disappearance tells us that a community venue disappeared. It tells us nothing whatsoever about whether anyone was writing code.
Nor is the history "the forum closed, everyone assumed AROS was dead, and then this community brought it back." That retelling skips the part worth knowing: why that forum stopped being a place the people actually developing AROS wanted to be. When developers and ordinary users leave a venue over the conduct of the same small group, what remains is not a representative community. It's the people who didn't leave, talking to each other. A handful of accounts posting for years is not evidence of where a project lives.
So "this is the only place that looks alive" doesn't mean development happens here. It can just as easily mean this is where the ones who stayed are still talking.
The same substitution runs through the whole post. "I didn't see much activity" became "AROS was dead." "This forum is active" became "this is the AROS community." "The website looks dated" became "the people behind upstream AROS are responsible for the state of the project." Not one of those follows from the one before it.
"AROS was dead."
Since the Git repository was created in May 2019, upstream AROS has taken 6,860 commits. In the last twelve months alone it took 2,492, from 32 different people. The most recent landed this week. Across that whole period Kalamatee authored 4,656 of them, about 68%. Deadwood authored 852.
Nobody discovered that AROS was dead. What was discovered is that a forum had closed, and a conclusion about a software project was drawn from the availability of a website. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction takes under a minute to demonstrate.
"Deadwood forked because 64-bit development was stagnating."
The post says "I suspect," so let's not pretend it's established. What can be established is that the fork diverged in May 2019, at the SVN-to-Git migration, and what it has consisted of since.
His repository holds 6,584 commits. He is the committer on 6,454 of them - 98%. He is the author of 2,443, about 37%. The largest body of authored work in that repository belongs to Kalamatee: 3,314 commits, just over half. Kalamatee has never committed to it. Not once, in its entire existence.
That isn't an accusation against Deadwood. His tree records authorship correctly, which is precisely how those figures were produced - from his clone. Anyone in this thread can run git shortlog -sne --no-merges against it and get the same numbers. He also does substantial original work, and his 2,443 commits are real.
But committing another person's work is not writing it. So when newcomers are told that v11 is well supported while upstream is finished, what is actually being described is upstream development reaching them through a downstream distribution, weeks to months after it was written. The fork gets the credit for it. The people who wrote it get described as having abandoned the project.
"v11 is pretty supported."
Some specifics, since this is where it stops being abstract.
RISC-V: 48 commits upstream, all by Kalamatee. Zero of them exist in the fork.
ARM and AArch64, including the Raspberry Pi work: 249 commits upstream, the majority by Bo Ståle Kopperud, who has contributed 281 commits in total and whose name rarely comes up in these threads. The fork contains 44 of those 249, and none of his.
So the architectures cited as evidence that AROS is progressing are, in large part, simply not in the tree being recommended.
Provenance.
A busy forum, a polished archive and enthusiastic users do not retroactively make upstream development the work of a fork. And upstream developers do not become answerable for a downstream community merely because both use the AROS name. Those are separate things, and the only record that distinguishes them is the commit history - who wrote what, when, and where it landed.
Why this is being raised.
Because this thread is not an isolated case. It is the same account of AROS that newcomers here are given repeatedly: that upstream is finished, that development happens downstream, and that the fork is where AROS now lives. None of it is true, and it doesn't survive five minutes with either repository, but it doesn't need to survive scrutiny when everyone in the room already agrees and no one checks.
That is how a project's work gets reassigned. Not by anyone lying, but by a small number of people repeating a convenient summary to people who have no reason to doubt it, until it becomes the version that gets passed on. The post above is that version being passed on again, by someone who says outright that he didn't know the history and had to be told it here.
If newcomers are going to be given "transparent information," give them all of it - including how this forum came to be the only one left, and why the people writing the code aren't on it. Don't take the consequences of a community that drove people out and present them as proof the project had died, and don't then use the space that left to claim its development history.
aros.org.
It isn't the upstream project's job to host an account of a downstream fork, which would necessarily mean hosting that fork's explanation of why it exists. If the difference between the lines needs documenting, ask the people who created the second one.
Use Deadwood's fork if that's what you want. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But stop calling it AROS, and stop presenting it as an official or sanctioned version of it. It is a downstream line, maintained by one person, containing a majority of code he did not write.
Edited by amigamia on 05-09-2026 10:36, 2 days ago
olivier2222NewbieamigamiaAdmin@amigamia - ... you have the power to correct them and explain (or better "prove"that what they are posting in here is incorrect or not based on facts. You are a member of this site just as they are...
In amending my own response, I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that whatever you chose to post in here is governed by the TOA (Terms of Agreement) you agreed to when you registered your account. In particular this:
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miker1264
olivier2222
DeremonMember
Posted 19 hours agoEdited by Deremon on 05-09-2026 13:54, 2 days ago
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sonountaleban
olivier2222
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Users who participated in discussion: amigamia, terminills, AMIGASYSTEM, cdimauro, miker1264, OlafSch, arosbeginner, Deremon, olivier2222, sonountaleban