openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2015/42

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

It only took ten days since the last snapshot. IT could be worse.. reasons are some issues to fix, some resource deviation (Leap RC1 has been released), so OBS and openQA, as well as human resources, were all a bit focused on Leap.

But, the latest Tumbleweed snapshot brings some big updates:

• GNOME 3.18.0 (Arch was faster this time…. sorry)
• PulseAudio 7.0
• KDE Applications 15.08.1

We already heard of some bugs that are important for you to know – and even more important are their fixes / workarounds for you:

• PulseAudio 7.0 / Plasma 5.0: they don’t like each other as much as they should; there are various crashers reported in kdeinit, kded, kmix. See https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=950487 for full details. There is a workaround posted in this bug:
  Modify /etc/pulse/default.pa to replace the line
load-module module-native-protocol-unix
with
load-module module-native-protocol-unix srbchannel=no
• Skype might not start up: there are users relying on this. Due to an internal OBS issue, it seems one of the packages (libharfbuzz0-32bit) was not properly synchronized and an old version kept on lingering in the repository (despite the new version being built properly). I heard your voices from the last issue with VirtualBox and a corrected harfbuzz is published in the update repository. With the next snapshot, this will be cleaned out again and corrected in the main repository).

Things that are being forged in the Factory are:

• KDE Applications 15.08.2
• GNOME 3.18.1
• Linux Kernel 4.2.3: this will obsolete the existing kernel-desktop flavor. kernel-default will be used in the future; the update is supposed to go smooth, but there are chances that some KMP packages won’t be auto-updated. Keep an eye out for them

Then, lastly, I would want to lose a word about the VirtualBox issues we had in the last week, so that people stop speculating in so many ways on how to avoid it.
First of all, VirtualBox is on the DVD (Ring 2), as such, it is being build tested in the staging areas. A new kernel for example can only enter Tumbleweed if the respective modules build. So, despite us updating the kernel with the 1002 snapshot, this was not the reason for the non-available KMPs.
So what was? In fact, the issue was human induced: we checked in systemd 224 and the new kernel together. Due to systemd, the build server configuration needed to be adjusted to reflect the new package names. This (and ONLY this) resulted in virtualbox turning ‘unresolvable’ – as its spec file hard-buildrequired wrong systemd packages. This was not caught in stagings by us… prjconf is happens to be a bit tricky in some cases.

But, yes, I admit, it took us too long to publish VirtualBox in the update channel… but then, workarounds have been around since the very beginning:

• Boot the last 4.1.x kernel: as zypp per default is set to keep the old kernel, this was still a valid option
• Instructions were posted on the Mailing list on how to manually build the package on your own machine
• The Virtualization repository had the fix for VirtualBox rather quick. Getting the package from there was thus also an option

I’ll promise to keep an eye out for such issues in the future and will attempt to deliver quicker solutions to you.

Have a great weekend a lot of fun.