14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Dimitri John Ledkov informs the Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Touch communities that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system will drop support for the Upstart init daemon and CGManager project.
Both Upstart and CGManager were key components for the next-generation Unity 8 user interface that Canonical built for its mobile and convergence vision. Unfortunately, as you already know, Unity 8 will no longer be developed, nor the Unity 7 interface for that matter, as future Ubuntu releases move to GNOME 3.
Previous Ubuntu Linux releases shipped with Upstart and CGManager, but the projects were kept in maintenance mode as they were only used for the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS and the Unity 8 desktop session to provide user session supervisor, as well as to implement application lifecycle.
Support for both Upstart and CGManager will be provided for the current LTS (Long Term Support) variants of Ubuntu Linux, as well as the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) offering, but it looks like they are going away from future releases of Ubuntu Linux, and Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) will be the first to ship without them.
"Upstart ongoing maintenance in the archive is not cost free, as their sources and testsuites must be continuously maintained and updated for the toolchain and kernel updates. Whilst both will be supported for the full length of LTS and ESM timelines, I do not wish to ship either in Artful," said Dimitri John Ledkov, Software Engineer at Canonical.
Here are the packages that will be affected by this change
As both Upstart and CGManager have dependencies, Canonical's Dimitri John Ledkov published a list with all the packages that are affected by this change, and which will also be removed from Ubuntu 17.10. These include upstart, upstart-watchdog, cgmanager, unity8-desktop-session, ubuntu-touch-session, ubuntu-touch-meta, and lxc-android-config.
In other words, the unity8-desktop-session and ubuntu-touch-session packages will be broken without Upstart, so you won't be able to install and run Unity 8 on Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), whose development is now officially open with daily build ISO images already shipping to early adopters. Ubuntu 17.10 is slated for release on October 19, 2017, with the GNOME 3 desktop environment by default.