Ubuntu Foundations Development Summary: August 8, 2017

This newsletter is to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Foundations Team.  There will also be highlights provided for any interesting subjects the team may be working on.

If you would like to reach the Foundations team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-devel channel on freenode.

Highlights

• Brian Murray explains how one can test an unsupported release upgrade path, like from Ubuntu 16.04 to Artful Aardvark, to test part of the LTS to LTS upgrade path. http://www.murraytwins.com/blog/?p=151
• Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote a how-to blog entry on signing kernel modules and other things for use with UEFI Secure Boot systems. http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/08/how-to-sign-things-for-secure-boot.html
• Cloud images for Xenial and newer have been released with updated packages, including the kernel, which has fixes to address CVE-2017-7533.
• Matthias Klose, Dimitri Ledkov, Balint Reczey and Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre are on their way to DebConf. If you’re heading there also, say hello!

The State of the Archive

• The ongoing libevent transition is at 88% of completion
• The GCC 7 transition has begun in artful-proposed; GCC 7 will be the default in 17.10, please help ensure your packages in the archive are up to date and ready to build with this new toolchain.
• The transition to Perl 5.26 is in progress in artful-proposed, with some delays due to issues with the autopkgtest infrastructure and a sync of a reupload from Debian.  This is expected to reach artful early next week.
• The python3 transition continues, with python3.5 being dropped from the list of supported versions in artful-proposed.  Packages uploaded today will build without python3.5 support, and python3.5 will be dropped from artful before release.

Upcoming Ubuntu Dates

• 16.04.3 point release came out on August 3, 2017!

• 17.10 Feature Freeze – August 24, 2017

Weekly Meeting

IRC Log: http://ubottu.com/