Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

During the last week, we have shipped a massive snapshot, due to a full rebuild (RPM libexecdir change, rpm payload compression change, and symlink changes to /etc/alternatives). The libexecdir was not exactly as smooth as we wish it to be, on the other hand, it was also not disastrous. The biggest issue seen by users was likely the no-longer working ‘man’ program. This was a trap by update-alternatives, that does not like changing target paths, paired with a packaging bug. In total, we have shipped 5 snapshots (0826, 0829, 0831, 0901 and 0902).

The most noteworthy changes were:

  • Mesa 20.1.6
  • Linux kernel 5.8.2 & 5.8.4
  • rpm: %{_libexecdir} is now /usr/libexec, and payload compression change from xz to zstd. This results in ‘faster decompression’ of the RPMs at roughly the same space (in average a bit smaller even)
  • VirtualBox 6.1.3: working support for kernel 5.8
  • Mozilla Firefox 80.0
  • Kubernetes 1.19

Currently, the developers are bust bringing you these changes, that are being tested in the staging areas:

  • KDE Applications 20.08.1
  • KDE Plasma 5.19.5
  • systemd 246
  • glibc 2.32
  • binutils 2.35
  • gettext 0.21
  • bison 3.7.1
  • SELinux 3.1