openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/20

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we had some trickier changes entering our beloved distro, which might even have causes some (minor) problems for you while running zypper dup. It’s about how we package symlinks in our RPMs. So far, brp-check-suse converted the symlinks to absolute ones, then rpm warned about that fact. No way of pleasing the packager, right? The brp policy has been updated and symlinks are now all converted to relative ones (almost all – things to /dev stay absolute, e.g. /dev/null). This has some advantages when inspecting chroots or other layouts that could be mounted somewhere else. The issues seen were that not everything got rebuilt in the same go, which resulted in zypper complaining about file conflicts. The error was save to be ignored, but annoying. In total, we have released 5 snapshots this week (0507, 0508, 0509,0511 and 0513) containing these changes:

• Absolute->Relative symlink changes, as described
• Mozilla Firefox 76.0
• Linux kernel 5.6.11
• KDE Plasma 5.18.5
• KDE Frameworks 5.70.0
• NetworkManager 1.24.0
• Libvirt 6.3.0
• GCC 10.1 (still not the default compiler)

The staging projects are still filled up with these major changes:

• Inkscape 1.0
• TeXLive 2020
• RPM change: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build
• Qt 5.15.0 (currently release candidate is staged)
• Guile 3.0.2: breaks gnutls’ test suite, but it passes when built with gcc10
• GCC 10 as the default compiler