Roadmap

About this document: the individual roadmap items now live as GitHub issues labeled roadmap. That is the list to browse, search, claim, and close. This page keeps only the framing that does not belong to any single item: why a theme matters, and what has already landed. Design discussion belongs in the relevant docs/*.md — link to it from the issue.

Developer Experience

The biggest leverage area: making yoe pleasant for the developer writing apps that run on yoe-built devices, not just for the author of a distro.

Source can directly embed units

A .star file living in the application’s own source tree, declaring its dependencies and included directly from a PROJECT.star. This is what lets yoe serve as an application build tool as well as a system build tool.

Build & Deploy Loop

Goal: app developers work directly in their app’s git repo, not against an extracted SDK. The build container is the SDK. See dev-env.md for the design.

Needed Units

Existing units can be found via yoe list or by browsing modules/units-core/units/. Units still wanted are filed individually.

Testing

Today: Go unit tests under internal/* and a single dry-run e2e test. No on-device tests, no image smoke tests, no build-time package QA, no CI workflow that runs builds. Design and intended shape in testing.md, which also compares to Yocto’s oeqa / INSANE.bbclass / ptest / buildhistory.

Self-Hosting

The ultimate dogfood test: develop yoe on a yoe-built device. Forces the distro to be capable enough for real engineering work, not just demo targets, and surfaces gaps in container hosting, editor experience, and the build cache all at once.

The first cut shipped as selfhost-image for the Raspberry Pi 5 — see selfhost.md. It bundles yoe, Go, Docker, git, bubblewrap, and the dev-image tool set.

Already landed

Kept here because the roadmap is where these were last tracked; the detail lives in the linked docs.

• glibc target. yoe builds glibc/.deb images via the Debian and Ubuntu backends (apt_feed), in addition to the musl/.apk Alpine path. Both Debian and Ubuntu are CI boot- and SSH-verified on arm64 and x86_64. This enables workloads whose binaries require glibc (some cgo, prebuilt vendor SDKs, the upstream Helix release, etc.).
• yoe serve / yoe deploy <unit> <host> / yoe device repo {add,remove,list}. See feed-server.md.
• Source download retries and mirrors. A transient upstream failure is retried, and a unit that lists mirrors falls back to them once the primary URL is exhausted. See caching.md.

See yoe-tool.md for design notes on (planned) CLI sections, and metadata-format.md for the unit and configuration format.