Perl 5.26 and GCC 7 transitions are in progress as well

Aug 8, 2017 21:56 GMT  ·  By

We like the way Canonical keeps the community behind its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system up-to-date with what's going on behind closed doors, and a new newsletter from Ubuntu Foundations Team is out now.

The Ubuntu Foundations Team newsletters highlight some of the biggest things happing behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and we'd like to inform the reader about some of them, too, in particular those affecting the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release.

Ubuntu 17.10 development is ongoing with a lot of stuff still need to be done, especially for the Unity to GNOME Shell transition, and it now looks like the operating system is approaching Feature Freeze stage, which should happen in two weeks from today, on August 24, 2017.

Feature Freeze means that Canonical will stop introducing new features, new packages, or other major changes to the OS, focusing only on fixing critical bugs, and, for that, they need community's help. A first Beta release of Ubuntu 17.10 is expected at the end of the month for that, on August 31, 2017.

Python 3, Perl 5.26, GCC 7, and libevent transitions are still in progress

Apart from the big user visible changes coming to Ubuntu 17.10, which will ship with the GNOME desktop environment by default, there are also major changes happing under the hood, such as the transition to the latest and greatest Python 3, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7, and Perl 5.26 technologies.

"The Python 3 transition continues, with Python 3.5 being dropped from the list of supported versions in artful-proposed. Packages uploaded today will build without Python 3.5 support, and Python 3.5 will be dropped from artful before release," reveals Canonical in the latest Ubuntu Foundations Team newsletter.

As for Perl 5.26 and GCC 7, they're both in the proposed repository of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), and Canonical promises that they will be the default in the final release, which hits the streets on October 19, 2017. Of course, Canonical warns maintainers to make sure their packages are buildable with the new toolchain.

There's also the transition to the libevent library, which provides asynchronous event notification on Ubuntu 17.10. So, as you can see, there's a lot of work going on at Canonical as they want to bring all the latest GNU/Linux technologies to Ubuntu 17.10, and these transitions are expected to hit stable early next week.

Ubuntu 17.10 will be officially available for public testing on September 28, 2017, when we expect Canonical to launch the Final Beta release. By then, everything should be in place, including the modified GNOME desktop environment with the new default apps, the Wayland session by default, as well as the Linux 4.13 kernel.