Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

It has been a very busy week, but it has shown how much enthusiasm every contributor puts into Tumbleweed. There have been again 4 snapshots released (0609, 0611, 0612 and 0613) and this marks the end of ‘Tumbleweed being built using GCC 5’. As usual, one end is just the beginning of something new: starting with Snapshot 0614 (or any higher number, in case openQA won’t agree) the entire distribution is built using GCC 6 as compiler.

Let’s first look back what the four snapshots delivered:

  • QEmu 2.6.0 (we were at 2.4 for way too long, and missed openGL support)
  • Wayland 1.11.0 – stable release (you already enjoyed the RCs though)
  • Mozilla Firefox 47.0
  • Linux kernel 4.6.2 – Some broadcom users were waiting for that
  • A lot of YaST updates – See also the YaST reports for what nice things they work on

What can we expect from the future? As mentioned, snapshot 0614 is currently being built using GCC 6. This will be a rather large update, as literally everything is being rebuilt again. After being in Stagings for quite a while, everything up to Ring2 (stuff on the DVD, ~2200 packages) built. With GCC 6 now being the default compiler, it was expected that quite some of the non-ring packages (another ~ 7000 packages!) will cause some trouble. The build is not all done yet, but we are at around 200 errors that need fixing (see boo#984984 for a reference what still needs work).

And despite all this, no contributor is getting tired and many more, even bigger updates are scheduled in the Staging areas:

  • Qt 5.6.1 – some important bug fixes it seems
  • KDE Applications 16.04.2
  • KDE Framework 5.23.0
  • TeXLive 2016
  • GIT 2.9.0

If there is anything you want to discuss with the community, next week is THE opportunity, as the openSUSE conference will be held in Nuremberg, starting Wednesday, June 22nd. I am looking forward to see you there.

A note regarding the breakage we had seen in snapshot 0605 (pam config files getting overwritten): we have since configured a new test in openQA that installs a current Tumbleweed snapshot and will try to update this new install right to the snapshot that is being tested. This should help us catch such issues next time around.

Let’s have a lot of fun