openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Weeks 2016/36

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Another week with 4 snapshots has passed, sadly some issues managed to sneak in but, as you are used to by Tumbleweed already, we managed to resolve the issues on the mailing list in no time and made sure that upcoming snapshots get the fixes asap. The snapshots published were 0901, 0905, 0907 and 0908.

Notable updates in those snapshots:

• Mozilla Firefox 48.0.2 and Thunderbird 45.3.0
• Binutils 2.27
• gcc 6.2.1 – The entire distro was rebuilt with this compiler
• zsh: was responsible for some users having trouble on login. An update had been provided in the update channel and snapshot 0908 had the definitive fix for it
• ntp: the daemon was attempting to reuse the proper user instead of root, as per configuration. Unfortunately, this also caused some headaches, especially notable in long bootups. This change was reverted in 0908 as well
• GStreamer 1.8.3
• Pulseaudio brings ofono headset support

Unfortunately, none of the two issues we had this week were spotted by openQA:

• zsh issues were missed, as all tests run with the default shell configured for the test users, being bash.
• ntp issue was not seen as it ‘only’ causes a slow down on boot. openQA is, at this time, not usable as a performance regression test tool (there is too much variation with the virtualisation tools and generally well booked servers)

At this point a big ‘thank you’ to all the people involved in tracking down the culprits and discussing solutions for as long as it was needed.

Upcoming changes:

• Mesa 12.0.2
• Appstream: our apps will receive translation information in the metadata
• glibc 2.24
• Linux kernel 4.7.3
• KDE Frameworks 5.26.0
• KDE Applications 16.08.1
• GNOME 3.22 (actually 3.21.91) entered Staging:G

Quite a list getting together here – and I had the feeling we were slowed down by various OBS and openQA issues… this clearly seems not to hinder us as much as it feels like.

Cheers!