While we were planning the upcoming UCS development stage, we decided to start working on the next major version: UCS 5.0 is planned for next year. In this article I would like to let you take a look behind the scenes and share some of our plans with you.
It’s been almost 5 years since we released UCS 4.0. During this time, UCS has evolved a lot. At the same time, we’ve continued to maintain the old version’s features. While most of them are popular with our users, others are not. There are also some things we would do differently if we had to do them again. By jumping to the next major version, we would like to get rid of some relics and implement several new features at the same time. We’re still at the very beginning, so not all decisions are final yet – but true to the motto “be open” I would like to share some of our ideas and plans in this blog post.
Changing to Debian 10 “Buster”
The new release will see an update of the base, and we will upgrade to Debian 10 (codename “Buster”), released in September 2019. In addition to all the upgraded packages, we will continue to reduce the differences between Debian and UCS in the main distribution. For example, Debian now has working UEFI Secure Boot (partly thanks to our support), so UCS no longer needs to make any adjustments.
Migration to Python 3
Most of our software at Univention is being developed in the Python scripting language. UCS 4.x uses the Python 2 runtime environment, although Python 3 has been around for quite some time. Python 3 is going to be the standard for implementations in UCS 5.0, so that we and our partners can benefit from the possibilities of the new version. You can see the first steps of this transition in UCS 4.4 as some of the packages have already been converted. Integrations or projects that make use of Python-based UCS interfaces such as UDM hooks or listener modules should run some checks until the release of UCS 5.0 to ensure Python 3 compatibility.
