The developers are now focusing more on bug fixing

Oct 28, 2015 14:20 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu developers have been busy with the next OTA update that is planned for Ubuntu Touch, and it looks like they are now clearing the way for the next release. A feature freeze is now in effect for the new OTA update.

Ubuntu Touch has a six-week development cycle for the OTA updates, and it looks like things are moving in the right direction. Despite the important packages that have landed until now, the team hasn't encountered any major problems. It turns out that the Mir and Unity improvements won't be such a hassle after all.

The previous OTA update was very well received by the community, and it didn't cause any issues. On the other hand, there weren't too many big changes that could be easily spotted by the users. OTA-8 will change that, and the developers are saying that it's going to be one of the biggest ones so far.

Feature Freeze now in effect

When the cycle reaches the Feature Freeze milestone, the developers start focusing on bugs, and no more features are added. The team has about two weeks to get everything straightened out before the launch.

"A rather quiet landing day today. We had a new dialer, messaging, address-book and Ubuntu-system-settings released, mostly continuing the portage to UITK 1.3 that came with our newest framework. Today is also feature freeze, meaning starting tomorrow no features are allowed to land on the phones without an exception procedure. There shouldn't be too many of those this time, though, Now, after feature freeze, developers will concentrate on bugfixes. There's a lot of those to work on, but the current schedule sets 2 weeks for landings until OTA-8 final freeze," said Canonical's Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak.

We have already written about the new features that will be landing in OTA-8, and we can say for sure that it's going to be a glorious release.