Ubuntu 26.04 availability

[philhagen]

Ubuntu 26.04 is in final prerelease versions and will be GA in April 2026. What's the anticipated schedule for SIFT to be 26.04-based?

[ekristen]

Great question. It depends on how much they've changed. Since all the major python work is done, I suspect this update will be a much smaller lift then the last one. I'll run a test build and see how things go. We try to do it as soon as possible, history has shown us 3-6 months after release due to the amount of changes required, perhaps this will go faster. Once I run a build I'll know more.

[philhagen]

got it - thanks. FWIW, 3-6 months is a really long time on the arc of courseware development. for example:

• April 2026: 26.06 releases (assumed)
• July-October 2026: SIFT adopts. (Let's say Sept 2026 to be conservative)
  If authors were able to instantaneously include this version into a course submission, and turn in an update in Sept 2026:
• Dec2026-Jan2027: Release for first classroom runs

That puts course content nearly a year out of date. Just looking at the critical path for content development and consider what base VM is the most prudent to build from.

[ekristen]

3-6 months isn't the goal, just being honest in what the time has taken in the past due to the overwhelming amount of changes that the OS has made. I'll run a test build here shortly. I'll let you know the outcome of it.

[ekristen]

(I have a test build running)

[philhagen]

Understood - thx. Again, just trying to plan out development timelines and anticipating the usual (valid!) comments about tech currency.

[ekristen]

test build didn't go so well, wouldn't even boot, seems like they changed the auto install parameters a bit, will debug that. i'll get a manual copy of 26.06 installed and see what SIFT itself does.

[philhagen]

ugh. ok thanks for the update. will keep tracking this but divert dev effort to other VMs while its being worked out. thx again

[ekristen]

test build via docker on 26.06 running server mode only right now, we'll see how that looks.

[ekristen]

Not terrible. This was server mode, not including desktop, a good majority of these are dependent failures, so the count is likely considerably less than 92. I'm hopeful it won't take long to figure out.

Summary for local
--------------
Succeeded: 624 (changed=594)
Failed:     92
--------------
Total states run:     716
Total run time:  1704.417 s

[ekristen]

We also have to wait for GIFT team to release for 26.04 and we are only down to ~4 custom packages we have to build now.