14 DAY TRIAL // Today, April 26, 2016, Canonical, through Matthias Klose, has announced that the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Linux kernel-based operating system is now officially open for development.
We had already informed our readers at the end of last week that Canonical had started seeding daily build Live ISO images of its upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 operating system. You might know that the OS was dubbed Yakkety Yak by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on the day when the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) was launched, April 21, 2016.
And now, Ubuntu developers and package maintainers are being informed that the development of Ubuntu 16.10 is open. What this means is that they can start uploading new versions of their software to the main software repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution, and there are already some major, under-the-hood changes that they need to be aware of (see below for details).
"Please don't procrastinate work targeted for Yakkety. We ended the Xenial development cycle with more outstanding build failures and more outstanding merges than previous release cycles," says Matthias Klose. "An upload doesn't end when you hit upload, but needs to build, and then migrate to the release pocket of the archive."
Ubuntu 16.10 to include GCC 6.2
As mentioned before, the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) development starts with some under-the-hood changes. Among them is the ability for the GCC compiler to build with -fPIE by default for the 64-bit (amd64) and PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (PPC64el) platforms. Moreover, there's transition of the libpng 1.6, Boost 1.60, and ICO 57 libraries, along with the transition of various other core components from upstream (Debian).
One of the most exciting features of the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle is that the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) packages will be rebased to the 6.2 branch in the coming months, around June or July 2016, when the first Alpha build is made available to public testers, but only for the opt-in flavors. See the entire release schedule of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) in out initial report.