openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2015/47

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

It’s been another week in which the weed has been steadily tumbling. A solid three snapshots have been published this week (with a 4th one being tested right now in openQA)

The snapshots brought you those goodies:

  • GNOME 3.18.2
  • KDE Applications 15.08.3
  • Many other smaller fixes (sddm 0.13, python-coverage update)

The snapshot currently running through openQA (20151118) will bring some bigger additions:

  • the new default system fonts (that’s why it takes a bit longer: all needles in staging had of course been updated, but the full Tumbleweed QA has > 70 tests compared to the ~10 running in Stagings, so a bunch more needles missing). With the current progress, though, we should be able to expect QA to pass later today or on the weekend.
  • Ghostscript 9.18: it did cause a few build failures in stagings already (renamed error variables); so if you’re building anything against it, you might be hit by this too.
  • X.Org 1.18: if you’re running binary blob drivers, you might want to block off this update. The vendors might take some time to get their drivers in shape.
  • Mesa 11.0.5: addressing a bunch of stability issue with nouveau and i965 drivers

The staging projects are currently all busy – Some of them need your help to resolve the pending issues. The main updates causing issues are:

  • Boost 1.59: I think everybody expects issues with a new boost version by now. This time around, all but one have been fixed: cmis-client still fails on ppc64le.
  • GStreamer 1.6: most of the packages seem ready for this. The critical component missing is Phonon

Besides all those updates, we’re struggling a lot with building java-related packages since the update of Kernel to version 4.3.0 – it seems this kernel, running as guest in KVM, triggers some bugs that are only seen when building / running java related things (see also boo#954218)

With all this, I wish you a great weekend – and always remember: Have a lot of fun