GCC Upgrade For Ubuntu Linux 15.10 ‘Wily Werewolf’ On The Horizon

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux extensions – if not the most popular Linux extension – in the world. Canonical has taken the complicated and intimidating world of Linux and turned it into an inviting OS for anyone who wants to try it. It’s not as friendly as Windows or OS X by any means, but it’s certainly less complicated than Fedora or Arch. A couple of weeks ago, Canonical announced the Alpha status release of Ubuntu 15.10 ‘Wily Werewolf’ and more recently, the company announced that developers have decided to upgrade the GCC package for Wily Werewolf.

When Ubuntu 15.10 Alpha was released the it featured images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Cloud Images, and more. However, it has not yet been recommended for anyone isn’t comfortable with running into occasional (or frequent) breakage, or who needs a stable system. Ubuntu developers are working hard to improve Wily Werewolf as evidenced by the move to upgrade to GCC5.

It will take a while to make the transition but Ubuntu 15.10 isn’t a major release in the grand scheme of things anyway, so there’s plenty of time to make sure everything goes according to plan. “GCC 5 will be the default compiler for the wily release, and it’s time to prepare the change of the default in wily, so that we don’t have to do it during the next release cycle before the next LTS release. This time things are a bit more complicated, we basically need to rebuild all C++ packages using g++ 5, and we are not able to fall back to a newer compiler,” said Matthias Klose.

Developers are asking that everyone begin testing the new changes as soon as they are implemented because it is crucial to do so before the LTS version of Ubuntu arrives in 2016. If problems are encountered, developers want to make sure there aren’t any major issues with an LTS version that’s supported for five years.