openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/16

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Tumbleweed seems to have found its rhythm at around 4 snapshots per week. I will cover the snapshots 0414, 0415, 0416 and 0417. After that, it took unfortunately a bit of effort to get more stagings ready. This then lead now to the fact that the next snapshot (0422) will be rather large. I will mention more about this further down.

What were the 4 last snapshots about:

• GNOME 3.20.1
• Samba 4.4.2 (ensure to update using zypper dup!)
• Many other bugfixes and updates

The next snapshot (20160422) will be rather large and quite some packages will have new release numbers. Glibc 2.23 finally found its way through staging, which was the perfect time to change OBS to do a full rebuild of the distribution, ensuring all packages are again built against each other. Further, we disabled the support script that “removed the .desktop file translations in favor of gettext based language overlays”. Even though this was an interesting feature, it lead to quite some issues in the past with the fast pace of Tumbleweed. Sometimes upstream shipped a .desktop file with correct translations, but we stripped those ‘in favor of our own’ (which often were based on older strings). No longer doing this means eliminating all kind of such issues. But it was another reason for full package rebuilds. In an attempt to minimize how often we trigger such large updates, we scheduled this intentionally together with the glibc update.

There are still a couple of things prepared in staging, most notably:

• Qt 5.6 – The YaST issue / installer not having keyboard focus is still present
• Linux Kernel 4.5.2
• KDE Applications 16.04.0
• GStreamer 1.8.0

Let’s all work on all those great additions and many more