openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/03

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Shame on me for giving you the information about the changes in Tumbleweed during this week only now, but at least technically this is still the review of Week 03. Since the last weekly review, there have been 6 snapshots published (0114, 0115, 0118, 0119, 0120, and 0121).

The main changes this week include:

• Linux kernel 5.10.7
• GNOME 3.38.3
• Mozilla Tunderbird 78.6.1
• Mesa 20.3.3
• openSSH 8.4p1
• Tcl/Tk 8.6.11
• Bash 5.1.4
• PHP 8 was added
• Wine 6.0
• Multiple versions of python 3 parallel installable. Besides all python-FOO packages being built for python 3.8, they are now also built for python 3.6 (where they make sense and are buildable). The packages are named python36-FOO and python38-FOO. As Python 3.8 is currently the default python 3 interpreter in Tumbleweed, all python38-FOO packages provide/obsolete the python3-FOO symbol, in order to facilitate the migration to the new naming scheme.

The future changes that are currently being planned, worked on and being tested include:

• Postfix: change the default database format to lmdb, migrating away from BerkleyDB.
• icu 68.1: breaks a few things like PostgreSQL. Staging:I
• Rust 1.49: breaks librsvg
• Automake 1.16.3
• Autoconf 2.70: breaks quite a few packages. The list of failures has been noted on the current SR; no active staging left for it (no progress in the last days/weeks on it)
• Migrate to LUA 5.4 as main lua interpreter, mainly relevant in context of RPM and thus the distro bootstrap