This is one of the biggest updates to Ubuntu Touch released so far

Mar 24, 2014 14:19 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu developers are putting all the effort they can possibly muster into Ubuntu for phones, and this can be easily seen from their latest release, which is one of the biggest and most important in a while.

Canonical decided that it was time to upgrade to Qt 5.2.1 a couple of weeks ago and the developers have been confronted with an array of problems and stopping bugs, on top of the issues that already existed. This might not be a particular important occurrence, but too many days have passed since the previous release and the development entered a stage called TRAINCON0.

Basically, all the developers start to focus on fixing the existing problems and the distribution enters a temporary freeze and no one pushes new features. This is not the first time that it happened and all the developers worked really hard to get past this hurdle.

The end result has been exactly what they were expecting for, a new stable release for Ubuntu Touch, although a couple of problems remain. For example, when upgrading to Qt5.2, the music app no longer plays the next song if the screen is off and the alarms are not going off reliably on recent Touch images.

“As many of you know from watching the mailing list, in the morning we entered the so called TRAINCON0 - a state when too many days have passed since the last promotion and now are not landing anything besides fixes for the blocking issues.”

“But that was the status in the morning. After gathering feedback and assessing the risks and possible gains, in the end we have decided that we will try promoting the latest image (#250) by whitelisting the current left-over blockers and setting them as a priority blockers for the next promotion,” said Ubuntu developer Łukasz Zemczak.

This means that the latest image release, the 250th, is based on Qt 5.2 and comes with a host of fixes and changes for Unity8, ubuntu-download-manager, core apps, keyboard, and a bunch of others.

Ubuntu developers have said that a couple of new blockers still remain, but they should be fixed this week, in a way that allows the Ubuntu images to have a 100% test pass rate.

Ubuntu developers have a series of automated and manual tests in place that allow them to scan for problems before releasing a buggy image to the public. It makes the release process a lot faster, which is actually good news for the end user.