With the recent EOL of Ubuntu Precise, we are planning to begin setting the default distribution for builds to Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 on Tuesday, the 18th of July. Or in other words, projects without an explicit dist YAML key in their .travis.yml file will be routed to Trusty instead of Precise. The tentative plan is to make dist: trusty the default for all builds by the end of August 2017. More details follow:

What’s in a dist

The current behavior that we guarantee is that any configuration we receive that does not explicitly set a value for dist is given a default value of precise. Once the rollout process is complete, the new default for all incoming configurations will be dist: trusty.

For example the following .travis.yml

language: ruby
sudo: false
script: bundle exec rspec

currently becomes:

language: ruby
sudo: false
script: bundle exec rspec
dist: precise

And, from July 18th onwards, the same initial .travis.yml will become

language: ruby
sudo: false
script: bundle exec rspec
dist: trusty

How to know

The dist value is shown in the View config tab:

Make it stop

If you are in a position where you cannot run on Ubuntu Trusty, or need more time to address the differences, please explicitly set dist: precise as soon as possible:

language: python
dist: precise
sudo: false
script: py.test -v

The future

As mentioned in the introduction, our tentative plan is to make dist: trusty the default for all configurations to by the end of August 2017. Once this rollout is complete, our attention will turn to the retirement of container-based Ubuntu Precise. The tentative plan is to begin overwriting configurations that specify dist: precise to include sudo: required beginning in September 2017.

By the end of September 2017, we hope to have 100% of incoming configurations with dist: precise routed to the sudo-enabled infrastructure, and to retire the container-based infrastructure. We have no immediate plans to discontinue support for jobs that specify sudo: required and dist: precise, although we do not plan to update the images for these jobs any more.

Once more, with calendar

NOTE: these dates are tentative