Ubuntu 19.10 enters the development phase

Canonical announced today that Ubuntu 19.10 will be officially released on October 17th. But before that, developers can already participate in the test experience in advance. Last week, Canonical pushed a daily build of ISO images to public testers, meaning that Ubuntu 19.10 has officially entered the development phase. It will come pre-installed with the Python 3.7 and GCC 9 series compilers, but the Python 3.8 version is also available in the repository.

The tentative plans for Ubuntu 19.10 with what we’d expect:

 gcc-9 as the default gcc.

 glibc 2.30 when it becomes available in August or later.

 python3.7 as default and supported, with python3.8 as simply available in the archive. As the 3.8 final is too close for the 19.10 release. The plan however is to have python3.8 as the default and supported in 20.04 LTS.

Speaking of python2  hopefully, it can be demoted from Main to Universe this cycle. We are currently left with deja-dup/duplicity (port completed upstream), heartbeat (pacemaker v2 stack doesn’t need it), mailman3 is getting promoted to main this cycle, and OpenStack Swift. I am not sure where the latest status is on OpenStack Swift, but hopefully, we can get Swift to move to python3 this cycle.

Also hoping to switch default/only implementation of bzr to the python3 port breezy .

 icu transition to 64.2 or newer. And we also need to backport support for the new Japanese era Reiwa (令和) into stable releases. Not sure how that will be done yet.

⬣ boost transition to 1.70 or newer. Mostly to get better compiler support.

 OpenJDK 11 as default, with 8 & 13 available.

️ golang updated to 1.12.