14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu for phones is going through a rough week and no new images have been promoted, mostly because of a few nasty bugs that prevented the release of a new stable version. The developers are working to fix the problem, but it might take a while until Ubuntu Touch users get their updates.
If you are using Ubuntu on your phone, you might have noticed that no updates have arrived in a while, unless you are subscribed to a development channel. The Ubuntu developers have had problems with the recent images and they haven't released anything on the stable channel for some time.
“It seems we really had an unlucky week! We were not able to promote an image today because of multiple issues. First our landings were stalled because of chroot problems in the archives - and when we were finally able to build and land everything that was required to unblock promotion, image #150 appeared to be completely un-bootable! The root cause has been identified (in the recent changes in user handling) with a work-around quickly hacked and released.”
“Image #151 is now available in the -proposed channel and it should be usable once again! Image #151 will therefore be our first promotion candidate. On Monday we will check how the test results for this and the subsequent images look like and try to announce a new devel channel addition as soon as possible,” says Ubuntu developer Łukasz Zemczak.
The devs are now initiating a TRAINCON-0 mode, which means that any important updates will now be double tested by the QA people, which actually slows down the rhythm of the releases. This actually ensures that no new bugs are introduced until all of the older ones have been fixed. This is not the first TRAINCON-0 and the previous one was very short, so users might get their precious updates back on track.
Users can test Ubuntu Touch right now if they have a Nexus 4 or a Nexus 7 device. Installing the operating system is pretty easy and it's possible to keep the Android OS. Users will also be able to import their Contacts and Calendar from Google, which makes it very easy to switch to Ubuntu Touch without any major problems.
Ubuntu developers have a series of automated and manual tests in place that allow them to scan for issues before releasing an image to the public. It makes the release process a lot faster, which is actually good news for the end user.