Good news, everyone!
The Ubuntu Release Management Team (utkarsh, hyask, andersson123) is now, in an effort to increase our visibility, starting to post monthly newsletters on Discourse, detailing all of our happenings and what have yous that have occurred in approximately the last lunar orbital period.
Releases 
Our bread and butter… In the last month or so, we’ve:
24.04.3was released! We’re proud to announce the 3rd point release for Noble Numbat LTS. For more information, check the release announcement.- Here are the release notes.
- And here is the summary of the changes between the point releases.
- EOL’d 24.10 Oracular Oriole. Hopefully you’ve already upgraded out of Oracular.
- Questing snapshot 3 was released timely and smoothly, publishing all 31 images, including our dear flavors. The images can be found here.
ubuntu-cdimage
We worked with IS to regularly backup all the images on cdimage to an off-site storage. This backup policy is now implemented, so we have regular off-site backup of all our images.
‘dangerous’ desktop images
We’re currently working on building what we’re calling dangerous images. These’ll be the same as daily desktop images for the devel series, but all of the snaps will be on their respective edge channels. This work is ongoing and there will be more news soon!
These images are intended to help developers who work on our seeded snaps. During the TPM FDE spike earlier this year, all the snaps for daily builds were switched to edge, to help developers. These dangerous images will remove the need to do this in future spikes - one of which starts on Monday!
For those who are unaware, within Canonical we’ve started doing ‘spikes’ this cycle. Spikes are segments of the cycle, 6 weeks long, where members of varying teams join together to focus on one topic, partially or entirely leaving behind their regular daily duties. There was a spike just after the Frankfurt sprint, working on TPM FDE. The next spike, which starts next week, focuses on the desktop prompting-client.
Preparatory work for the prompting spike
Some preliminary work has been done for the prompting spike:
- Preliminary work for testing usb webcam permissions:
- Added an
Ensure No Matchkeyword toyarf, which will be used to ensure that a usb webcam feed isn’t dead. - Organised with the cert team to have a usb webcam attached to a specified machine in the lab.
- Added a flag for preserving the debug video in
yarflogs, even in the event the test passes.
- Added an
- The ‘dangerous’ images, as aforementioned, is also being worked on for the prompting spike
GUTS - gui-ubuntu-testing-system 
GUTS is the new gui-ubuntu-testing-system. This service will be an orchestration system for graphical testing using yarf.
yarf is a graphical testing framework developed by the Hardware Certification team. It was recently open sourced. We use it for testing the desktop installer, and Pragyansh Chaturvedi has been using it to test Raspberry Pi’s. It is also the basis of the ubuntu-gui-testing repository, wherein we store yarf based tests for graphical applications from both snaps and debs. The idea is that GUTS will run the tests defined in ubuntu-gui-testing.
Most recently, on GUTS, we have:
- finalized the spec
- added an OpenApi spec
- added some basic architecture diagrams and documentation
- finished the initial setup of the postgres config for the service
- wrote the /job and /artifacts endpoints, along with setting up appropriate CI. This work is still in the review stage
Error Tracker
The error tracker is the project behind https://errors.ubuntu.com.
We’ve been migrating it from Bionic + Python 2 to Noble + Python 3, and migrating charms from old libraries with a ton of bash to using the ops library, as well as deprecating the mojo bundle in favour of a terraform spec.
Most recently, we’ve:
- stabilized the deployment of the new retracers
- moving self-healing functionality from cowboy’d cron jobs to charmed systemd units (charming
) - working on integration testing using jubilant
The repository for this service is here, for those interested in learning more!
Manpages
This is regarding https://manpages.ubuntu.com.
@jnsgruk recently charmed the manpages service, and we deployed it using these new charms. One less service manually deployed into production years ago that we’re still relying on!
However, the frontend is still pointing to the old deployment, something we’re working on!
Congrats! 
Congratulations to our wonderful Tech Lead Utkarsh Gupta for receiving a Valuable Contribution award! He was nominated for joining the team and immediately exceeding as a tech lead, and being pivotal in all of the releases we’ve done this first half of the cycle.
Bye 
That’s all for now! We’ll be back next month with another update. You can get in touch with us on the Ubuntu Release Matrix Channel if any of these topics are of interest to you or you have questions.