Updates to "Arduino AVR Boards"

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Hi.

The first thing that shows in Boards Manager is "Arduino AVR Boards", currently at version 1.6.20.

I've been always wondering where can I see some release notes for each version, or a version history. Or maybe a repository from which this is built where I could browse the commits myself?

Another thing I am curious about is when can we expect the next update, presumably 1.6.21. Where can I seek for such information?

Thanks.

2

You can find some release notes for Arduino AVR Boards with the IDE release notes since they are bundled together:

More detail can be found in the commit history:

Unfortunately they have not tagged the various releases of Arduino AVR Boards in the repository so you will need to go by the changes to the version value in platform.txt:

As for the next release, what has been happening lately is that the Arduino AVR Boards releases are done with the IDE release. Boards Manager allows them to push releases independently of the IDE but that hasn't been happening lately. There are some very big changes in the works for the 1.9.0 release with the move of the sketch preprocessing work from the arduino-builder tool to arduino-preprocessor, the addition of an autocomplete feature, and even most of the other more minor changes are being pushed to that branch so. There haven't been any significant bugs discovered in Arduino IDE 1.8.5 so there isn't a pressing deadline for another patch release. There are still some significant issues with arduino-preprocessor and I think there might be some problems with the autocomplete, though I haven't been following that closely so this makes me suspect the 1.9.0 release is still a ways off and likely there will be no Arduino AVR Boards release before that time. Also note that an IDE release doesn't necessarily mean a new Arduino AVR Boards release. If there is not significant changes to Arduino AVR Boards they might just use the previous release. The significant change I can think of that's in the works for Arduino AVR Boards is an update of the toolchain version, which will add support for the ATmega328PB (and maybe other PB variants?):

This has been a long time in the works but I have seen recent action on it.