14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Iain Lane informed the Ubuntu community of developers about the fact that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is now officially in Feature Freeze stage, effective immediately as of February 16, 2017, at 21:00 UTC.
According to the Zesty Zapus release schedule, February 16 marks both the Feature Freeze and Debian Import Freeze stages of development for Ubuntu 17.04, which means that application developers are no longer allowed to push new features to the upcoming operating systems, but only bugfix releases of their packages that address critical bugs.
"Version strings don't matter for Feature Freeze. If you upload a new upstream release and it has no new features, then you don't need an exception. If you add a deb/patch that adds a new feature, or [you] enable one via build flags then you do. We care about the content of the archive, not exactly how things got there," said Iain Lane in the mailing list announcement.
Iain Lane informs developers who still have some exciting new features that need to be submitted to the proposed repositories of Ubuntu 17.04 that they can go ahead and read the Feature Freeze Exception Process page on the Ubuntu wiki to familiarize themselves with the entire process.
Ubuntu 17.04 to get its first Beta release next week
Next week is another important step in the development cycle of Zesty Zapus, as the first Beta version will be released, but only for opt-in flavors like Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and eventually Ubuntu Studio, which did not participate in the Alpha milestone.
After the Beta 1 release, the Ubuntu 17.04 operating system will get its Final Beta milestone, which is also the last step before the final release is unleashed worldwide on April 13. The Final Beta is coming next month on March 23, and Final Freeze is set for April 6, when an internal Release Candidate (RC) version could land too.
Ubuntu 17.04 is not a major release, so there's nothing to get excited about. It should be powered by the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel and come with an updated graphics stack based on X.Org Server 1.19 and Mesa 17.0 3D Graphics Library. Most of the applications found in the repositories or are pre-installed on the ISOs are up to date.