Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This is the last review you will get this year and it spans actually two weeks this time, as I missed sending out the one last week on December 25th. Shame on me!

So, the two weeks gave us 5 Snapshots – some had to be discarded due to issues with systemd (more on this below).

What did the snapshots give you?

  • A long awaited fix in PHP5 that helped us properly rebuild the horde stack
  • The release notes should now actually talk about Tumbleweed
  • PackageKit 1.0.11 – minor fixes in the zypp backend, giving the zypp stack higher priorities in order to ensure we first get an updated zypp stack, before other updates
  • Linux Kernel 4.3.3 (with kernel-xen merged into kernel-default)
  • QEmu 2.4.0
  • Xen 4.6
  • LibreOffice 5.0.4
  • Wine 1.8 – Now no longer beta
  • Mozilla Firefox 43

It’s a pleasure to see that we all use the well deserved christmas break to fully work on openSUSE. The changes we got the last weeks are far from just minor packages here and there (some were in stagings for quite some time).

But that’s not all of course: the next snapshot is just finishing the build (it is labeled 20151229, which will be the last before we jump to the next year numbering). This is actually one many of you have been waiting for, as it will bring

  • Plasma 5.5.1
  • KDE Framework 5.17.0
  • The all new Tumleweed Branding package (bootsplash, backgrounds). There are some minor glitches, but it’s a nice gift to celebrate the new year with (the build/test of the snapshot will still take a while, so it won’t hit mirrors before tomorrow)

Now, with so much great stuff already released and just ready to be released, you wonder if there is still stuff in the Stagings? you bet there is:

  • Systemd 228: this actually already passed stagings once but needed to be reverted (that’s why some snapshots could not be released). Any user updating from 13.2 to Tumbleweed with this version of systemd integrated would result without a working network. Not something we wanted to see. An additional test suite was added to the Staging area to spot this very case earlier than checkin phase
  • The KDE Team is on fire: Plasma 5.5.2 is in Staging
  • KDE Applications 15.12.0
  • And of course the usual collection of smaller fixes here and there

With this, I want to send you out for the New Year’s celebrations! Have a great time and a

* HAPPY * NEW * YEAR *