openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/35

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we have published a few snapshots less than normal. To ‘compensate’, the next one will be huge to download though. On August 25, I merged the change for libexecdir == /usr/libexec and since then I’m fighting to QA after effects to get you a snapshot out that won’t break in all corners. There will likely be some rough patches here and there though.

Anyway, let’s see what DID happen in week 35: three snapshots have been published (0821, 0823 and 0824) containing these changes:

  • cURL 7.72.0
  • NetworkManager 1.26.2
  • fdupes 2.1.2 (upgraded from 1.61)
  • systemd 245.7: NOTE: an issue with a dangling symlink in /etc/systemd/system/tmp.mount was identified. A fix for this is in the TW-Update channel

As mentioned earlier, the next snapshot to come out (currently testing 0826, but this could still be discarded too) will be ‘large’ with respect to download size, as literally all 15000 packages in Tumbleweed have been rebuilt. There were multiple reasons to trigger a full rebuild (and I intentionally collected them to have this done in one go)

  • RPM: %{_libexecdir} changed to /usr/libexec. As this affects a lot of packages, and can change build results based on dependent packages file locations, a full rebuild was needed to be consistent in the end
  • RPM: The compression payload of our packages has been changed to zstd compression. This generally should result in faster decompression (read: installation) of RPMs. Downside: These packages can only be read with Leap 15.2 (and future versions) and Tumbleweed (newer than 20190713).
  • build: the build package was changed to also copy pkgconfig .pc files into the -devel-32bit package, if this is defined to be built in baselibs.conf.
  • brp-check-suse: The symlinks pointing to /etc/alternatives are no longer converted to be relative symlinks, as update-alternatives did not really like that and kept on complaining to the users.

And besides all what has happened, the Stagings are still filled up with:

  • Linux kernel 5.8.4
  • Mozilla Firefox 80
  • Chromium 85
  • Boost 1.74.0
  • Kubernetes 1.19
  • systemd package drops the dependency on sysvinit-tools
  • glibc 2.32
  • binutils 2.35
  • gettext 0.21
  • bison 3.7.1

7 responses to “openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/35”

  1. Tim Cuthbertson Avatar
    Tim Cuthbertson

    Thank you for the explanation. This did not feel like something that should happen in a rolling release; it seemed more like a fixed release full upgrade. I’m new to openSUSE (i.e., less than two weeks as a refugee from six years on Arch Linux). How often do things like this happen?

  2. bkdwt Avatar
    bkdwt

    Hi. Firefox still in v79 for me on Tumbleweed. Oo

  3. Chuck Burns Avatar
    Chuck Burns

    after this change, LOTS of things are broken in existing systems.

    man was still symlinked to /usr/lib/man-db/ rather than it’s actual location.

    I can no longer sshfs mount filesystems….

    This should have been tested better.

  4. Dominique Leuenberger Avatar

    There are a few changes that justfiy a full rebuild, to align the changes or to benefit from new technology. We try to keep those to a low minimum, usually there will be something like 3 of those rebuilds (glibc, gcc, and other tech). Whenever possible, I’m trying to collect those massive changes and bring the rebuilds together.

  5. Dominique Leuenberger Avatar

    Mozilla Firefox 80 has been released as part of snapshot 20200902

  6. Dominique Leuenberger Avatar

    re sshfs: Di dyou check for existing .rpmnew files on your systems? Did you merge the configuration? Namely: /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

    as for man: that was a bug that only triggered in some upgrade scenarios. But a force reinstall of the man package solved it, so allbeit not nice, it was not bringing any system down to a non-working state. Of course we’re striving for no problems seen by users