14 DAY TRIAL // The final Beta version for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and all its flavors is almost upon us and the development cycle has just entered the final freeze.
When Ubuntu enters feature freeze it means that no new features are accepted by the developers into the main repositories. This usually happens at the end of a development cycle and it's put in place so that devs can focus on fixing existing issues and to stop major bugs and issues affecting the final release of the distribution.
Canonical has been pushing a lot of new features into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and this might just turn out to be one of the most exciting releases in a long time. With such a wealth of new options and changes, some bugs might still be present and the problems must be fixed before users get their hands on the distribution.
“As of nowish, the archive is frozen for 14.04 Final Beta preparation, and will continue to be frozen from here until Final release next month. As with the previous release, we have a bot in place that will accept uploads that are unseeded and don't affect images. Don't take this as an open invitation to break Feature Freeze on those components, this is just to reduce the burden on the release team, so we only review the uploads that need very serious consideration,” said Adam Conrad from the Ubuntu Release Team.
Canonical has dropped the regular releases during the development cycle of Ubuntu and the developers only release a Final beta shortly before the final version is made available. That Final beta of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) is expected to arrive the day after tomorrow, on March 27.
Also, the flavor leaders have been invited to finish all the necessary testing by tomorrow morning at the latest and to submit all the announcement links.
“I will be doing one last Debian-installer upload later tonight and then one manual respin of all the images once the archive appears to settle down. After that, leads are on their own for spins via the tracker,” also said Adam Conrad.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) is expected to arrive on April 17 and Canonical hasn't missed a launch date yet. This final freeze is not exactly ironclad and, if some developer feels that something needs to be changed, it can be done with special permission, usually from release managers.