Android Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Beyond…

The legend of Cupcake… how it go so ridiculously popular I am not sure. But the Android loving masses wanted a touchscreen keyboard and when the name “Cupcake” surfaced, people never took their eyes off it. They wanted it. They needed it. But now they are going to Homer Simpson it.

The next dev branch of Android is called Donut.

Right now, Donut is identical to Cupcake and will be developed over time, mostly by Google but they are accepting submissions/updates/features from developers. We learn this from a discussion on Google Groups from April 26th:

branches with codenames (i.e. cupcake, donut), as well as the master branch, are evolving, they’re not frozen like tags.

There are tags for android-1.0, android-sdk-1.5-pre and android-1.5, which aren’t evolving.

Donut is the codename for the project that immediately follows cupcake (you can figure out the ordering by realizing that the codenames are in alphabetical order).

At this point, indeed, the code in donut is identical to that in cupcake. The focus has been primarily on cupcake, and while donut is ready to receive changes it hasn’t had any yet.

See that note about “Alphabetical Order”? We thought it would be fun to predict the possible names of the development branches for E through Z. My list is below, feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments!

As you can see I stuck with the dessert-ish theme but I suppose you could go in a more general “food” direction or even take it elsewhere. The Android dev branch naming pattern is like that of hurricanes every year… and both are on a path to destroy anything that comes in its way!

As for actual “practical” knowledge, Jean-Baptiste Queru imparts that upon us yet again in another thread on Google Groups:

Here’s the current situation:

-in each “code” repository:

  • release-1.0 is the branch for 1.0 as it was originally released. It should be considered read-only (i.e. we don’t normally accept submissions into it).
  • cdma-import is the branch that was used by Teleca (a member of OHA) to work on CDMA support in Android. read-only.
  • cupcake is the branch that follows the cupcake source tree that exists inside Google. it’s read-only.
  • donut is the branch for the first named project after cupcake. It’s still in the process of being set up. At the moment it’s still identical to cupcake. We might accept limited contributions into it at some point in the future (as we transition away from the model that we used for cupcake).master is the branch for all projects after donut. We accept contributions into it.
  • android-1.0 tags the original 1.0 code drop.
  • android-sdk-1.5-pre tags the 1.5 preview SDK. It’s the open-source part of the exact source that was used to build the SDK, so it can be used e.g. to match stack traces
  • android-1.5 tags the official 1.5 release of the Android Open-Source Project. It’s the one that should be used by people porting Android 1.5 to devices.

-within the “manifest” repository:

  • there are the same branches as in the “code” repositories, which point to the matching branches in all the code repositories.
  • there are branches for android-1.5 and android-sdk-1.5-pre, which point to the matching tags in all the code repositories (those have to be branches as an artifact of the way repo currently works).
  • there are the same tags as in the “code” repositories.

So there you have it… a little more information on the Donut, the naming pattern, and some fun guesses at the future dev branches! The question is, if Google has an oversized statue of each dev branch made, will the Google Campus start to look pervertedly similar to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch?

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