openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/01

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

A new year is already upon us, the first week of it is already. We humans might have to get used to writing ‘2021’ instead of ‘2020’, for Tumbleweed, this seems not to matter at all. The week has kicked off strong with 6 snapshots (0101, 0102, 0103, 0104, 0105, and 0106). The number of incoming submissions is also increasing again, showing that contributors are returning from their well-deserved holiday.

The most interesting changes in snapshots published this week were:

• Linux kernel 5.10.4; this kernel does cause some issues on Intel hardware, make sure to see https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1180543 and the workaround documented in comment#3
• Mozilla Firefox 84.0.1
• Mesa 20.3.2

The staging projects mostly contain the same major changes in planning, but work to get them ready is in progress:

• Plasma 5.20.5
• KDE Applications 20.12.1
• Linux kernel 5.10.5
• Xfce 4.16.0
• icu 68.1: breaks a few things like postgresql. Staging:I
• Multiple versions of python 3 parallel installable. Adding to python 3.8, version 3.6 will be reintroduced. Python modules will be built for both versions.
• RPM 4.16: all build issues in Staging:A have been fixed, the earlier reported crash on upgrades is also fixed. Final QA run in progress
• brp-check-suse: a bug fix in how it detected dangling symlinks (it detected them, but did not fail as it was supposed to)
• permissions package: prepares for easier listing, while supporting a full /usr merge
• Autoconf 2.70: breaks quite a few packages, Staging:C. NOTE: in some cases, it now implicitly starts gtkdocize; but at least for distro bootstrap packages (ring0) we cannot BuildRequire gtk-doc. So we must trick autoreconf with GTKDOCIZE=true
• Rpmlint 2.0: experiments ongoing in Staging:M
• openssl 3: not much progress, Staging:O still showing a lot of errors.