openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/23

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 2016/23 will go into the history books as the week a Tumbleweed snapshot sneaked through all openQA tests, hiding a breakage most users experienced. I’d like to apologize for the troubles you had with the 20160605 snapshot. I will explain at the end of the post how this could happen and how we plan on preventing such issues in the future.

In total we had again 4 snapshots since my last review. Those are 0602, 0603, 0605 and 0607.

Interesting updates delivered

• Postfix 3.1.1 (updated from 2.11.7)
• Linux Kernel 4.6.1
• Ruby 2.3 (parallel to Ruby 2.2, which is still marked default)

Things currently in staging

• GCC 6 as default compiler – Our gift to you for oSC#16
• Linux Kernel 4.6.2
• Libreoffice 5.2.0
• QEmu 2.6.0 (will be in 0609+)
• Mozilla Firefox 47.0
• Ruby 2.1 is scheduled for removal

And now, as promised, a short explanation how snapshot 0605 managed to sneak by openQA, despite the obvious issues it caused.
openQA is testing a lot of combinations, from fresh installs in various setups to uprades from various openSUSE Releases. None of those tests caused any problem.

The reason was rather simple: the update of pam-config replaced previously ‘ghost’ files with actual files with basic configuration. The basic configuration does not contain logind/systemd integration (pam_systemd.so), which is intentional. In case of new installations and upgrades from released products, this also did not matter, as they in any case had a systemd upgrade, which registers itself as pam service, thus fixing up the configuration again. Users frequenlty updating Tumbleweed did not receive a systemd update here, which made this fall through.

In order to avoid such issues in the future we’re planning on a ‘Tumbleweed-to-TumbleweedNext’ upgrade test in openQA: it will install what is currently published on FTP and then try to upgrade to what will come next. This can’t be done with disk images of Tumbleweed, but really needs to be a new install every time. But the complexity is worth the effort in order to avoid such issues.

And in case you did not yet resolve the issue on your system (an upgrade to a newer Tumbleweed snapshot does not correct it!), you can issue this command in a shell:
sudo zypper in -f systemd
That will re-register systemd in the pam configuration.

I wish you a great weekend and again trouble-free updating of Tumbleweed in the future.