Ubuntu 18.10 Planning For GCC 8.1, OpenJDK 11, Python 3.7

With Mark Shuttleworth yesterday having announced the Cosmic Cuttlefish, the development cycle for Ubuntu 18.10 is formally open.

Matthias Klose opened up the Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic cycle and syncs from Debian unstable are now done as well as importing GCC 8.1.0 but not yet making it the default. Around June or July is when they plan on shifting the default C/C++ compiler from GCC 7.3 to the recently released GCC 8.1 and then rebuilding the package archives. GCC 8 brings many features and improvements that will be great for Ubuntu 18.10.

Other compiler changes planned for Ubuntu 18.10 are upgrading to the OpenJDK 11 Java stack, and moving from Python 3.6 to Python 3.7. Those details can be found from this mailing list post.

Other prominent packages we are expected to see for the Ubuntu 18.10 release in October are GNOME 3.30, the Linux 4.18 kernel or maybe even 4.19, Mesa 18.3, X.Org Server 1.20, Wayland 1.15~1.16, and many other package updates with this not being a conservative LTS cycle.