Daily builds were already made available for download

Apr 26, 2017 21:42 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Adam Conrad announced the other day that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release on October 19, 2017, was officially open for development.

Ubuntu 17.10 was open for development since last Friday, but because there wasn't anyone to send the regular mailing list announcement to inform developers about this important fact, only a few knew about it. However, we're informing you today that Artful is officially open with two major packaging toolchain changes.

According to Adam Conrad, the first change is that ddebs will be generated using the upstream debhelper code, and the second one is for the dpkg package manager, which apparently will now produce .buildinfo files by default for all uploads, including source builds.

"This should, again, be mostly a no-op for you, but there is one gotcha, which is that multiple '-nc' runs of dpkg-buildpackage -S will produce a Debian/files in your source that shouldn't be there. We've been discussing how to eradicate that upstream, but if you care deeply about cruft, watch out for that," said Adam Conrad.

PIE could be enabled by default

It was also noted that Canonical's engineers will try to evaluate if PIE (Position Independent Executables) should be enabled by default for all supported architectures, including i386 (32-bit), ARM64 (AArch64), and ARMhf, bringing them in line with Debian and making it easier to evaluate FTBFS bugs between the two OSes.

Daily builds of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) are already available to download, for both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures, as we reported earlier, and they're based on Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) running the Linux 4.10 kernel, and still using the Unity 7 user interface, which will be replaced with GNOME 3 shortly.

Ubuntu 17.10 will follow the same development cycle like all previous releases, offering users two Alpha and two Beta milestones. The full release schedule was published last week if you want to mark your calendars, and keep in mind that Ubuntu GNOME will be merged with Ubuntu in this cycle.