The concept designs are a set of technical documents covering many aspects of the project, written through the history of the project, taking into account the status of the project at that time. These documents cover topics that have been researched but not necessarily implemented in Apertis at the time of writing.

Information in these documents may be outdated, but nonetheless provide important context for the decision making process and overall vision of the project.

Apertis test strategy

Apertis is an Open Source project which consists of multiple parts that are reflected in the current structure of Apertis Gitlab: Packages as the fundamental building blocks of the images Infrastructure to provide the tools and automation to build the images Tests which ensure that Apertis provides high quality standards This structure also shows that tests are one of the pillars of this distribution. The QA process takes advantage of the tests to confirm that the behavior of each component is the expected one. [Read More]

Robot Framework integration on LAVA

Introduction The aim of this document is to provide a suitable solution for integrating Robot Framework on automated test infrastructure setup on LAVA. LAVA infrastructure doesn’t support triggering or executing Robot Framework test suites as it is intended only for continuous integration. Thanks to this integration the coverage test can be extended to cover different test areas by adding additional customized libraries and toolchains. Integrating Robot Framework on LAVA infrastructure adds additional benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), ATDD (Acceptance test–driven development) and also allows to use a wide range of open source libraries developed for automation testing. [Read More]

Thin proxies: REST APIs

Apertis is a distribution that aims to provide solid bases to build products from IOT devices to complex HMI systems. The workflows to build such variety of products involves many different technologies, tools and developers’ background. A common issue during development is the need of high level APIs to interact with the system to allow application developers to focus on their use cases while hiding the complexity of low level system APIs. [Read More]

Moving to Gitlab issues

Apertis is an Open Source project which has been growing sustainable during the past years. This growth also made it spread across different projects and teams, requiring Apertis to improve the tools it uses. In this regard, one issue that prevents Apertis to be really open is the fact that the bug tracking system is only open to maintainers making it hard for the community to report new bugs or to keep track of them. [Read More]

Export controls

Apertis targets a global community, developing products with international reach, and this necessarily makes it interact with the legislation regulating the export of goods, software and technology. In particular, Apertis can be used on products that fall under the “dual-use” categorization since they can be used for both civilian and military applications. In the context of export controls, it is important to highlight that compliance is a property of a specific product as a whole, and that Apertis being compliant does not automatically translate to products built with Apertis to be compliant. [Read More]

On-screen keyboard

Apertis can be used with a touchscreen only, in this case the user will need an on-screen keyboard to be able to enter information like passwords, URLs, messages. This document outlines the current state of the Wayland protocols dealing with input methods, their implementation status as well as a possible approach for integrating this support into Apertis. Terminology and concepts In Wayland, multiple protocols are involved to allow users to enter text. [Read More]

Lifetime of documents

Apertis is an already mature distribution which fully supports the development of systems for embedded devices as well as a whole infrastructure to make that possible. During its evolution changes are necessary and updating documentation is a key point to making it user friendly. With the goal of having documentation that really expresses the current state of the distribution, having a process and procedure to manage the lifetime of documents is crucial since each new release introduces changes than can lead to documentation to become outdated. [Read More]

GPL-3 Deltas Assessment

Apertis the distribution is derived from Debian, from which it takes its philosophy, tools, workflows and packages. This robust, friendly and mature distribution provides a solid base on which to build an offering to suite the needs of very demanding markets such as the automotive industry. One big difference between Apertis and Debian is that Apertis avoids certain licenses, in order to allow its target market to avoid legal issues. Several licenses are considered unsuitable in parts of Apertis, GPL-3 being the most important one. [Read More]

Apertis Platform Technical Vision

Overview The intention of this document is to outline the Apertis technical direction and vision for the Apertis platform as it would be used on a device, container or VM. This document does not cover the overall Apertis infrastructure and its general principles around for example open source license expectations, image building and the release process. These topics are covered in their own respective documents. Apertis is, by design, a very flexible platform to build on. [Read More]

Status Page Review

Introduction As interest and use of Apertis grows it is becoming increasingly important to show the health of the Apertis infrastructure. This enables users to proactively discover the health of the resources provided by Apertis and determine if any issues they may be having are due to Apertis or their infrastructure. Terminology and concepts Hosted: Service provided by an external provider that can typically be accessed over the internet. Self-hosted: Service installed and run from computing resources directly owned by the user. [Read More]