Release announcements — new policy (effective v3.4.1)

[jnilo1]

Quick heads-up on how new firmware releases are announced going forward.

What changed

Starting with v3.4.1, I no longer post a separate announcement here when a new firmware version ships. The reason is simple — those announcement threads kept turning into ad-hoc support channels, where bug reports, install questions, and general discussion all ended up mixed into the same conversation. That's hard to navigate, hard to search later, and hard to follow for both users and me.

Where to find new releases

Every release is now published through GitHub's native release mechanism:

→ Releases page

Each release page contains a short summary of what's new, the full CHANGELOG for the version, and the git tag (e.g. v3.5.0) for git checkout / git pull users.

Get notified automatically

Click Watch (top right of the repo page) → Custom → tick Releases. GitHub will email you each time a new release is published. You won't get noise from issues, PRs, or unrelated discussions.

Found a bug? Need help?

Two separate channels, two separate purposes:

• Issues — for reproducible bugs in a specific release. Please include at minimum:
  • The release version (e.g. v3.5.0) — visible in the gateway's MOTD on SSH login
  • What you did, what you expected, what actually happened
  • Relevant dmesg excerpt or log snippet if applicable
  • Which path you flashed with (flash_install_rtl8196e.sh, flash_remote.sh, fullflash, …)
• Discussions — for questions, ideas, setup help, sharing experience, or anything that isn't a clear bug.

Keeping bug reports out of the Announcements category here makes it much easier for everyone to find and follow what matters to them, and lets me triage faster.

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In other news: v3.5.0 just shipped — see the release page for the details.

If you're still on a pre-v3 version (v1.x or v2.x), the v3.x line consolidates a lot of long-running work and is a worthwhile upgrade. The migration path (including backup and rollback) is documented in 3-Main-SoC-Realtek-RTL8196E/35-Migration/.

Thanks for following along!