Saturday 5 August 2017

Ubuntu Foundations Team - Weekly Newsletter, 2017-08-03

*Thursday, August 3, 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/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2017/ubuntu-meeting.2017-
08-03-15.06.moin.txt